This is really cool, though I think I'd have to change my search habits dramatically to really benefit from it. It'd probably be better suited for people who don't know exactly what they're searching for. Then again, I wonder if it would just confuse them further.
Correct: there's real chance I'll forget what I wanted to search if I'm presented with something else shiny before! It's dangerous and it will mostly make popular searches even more popular. It's a positive feedback loop, often a bad thing.
The other angle is: most of the time I use the omnibox etc to search, so I don't interact with Instant at all, but having it there on google.com for the few times I am searching for something more complex (misremembered song lyrics are a favourite of mine) is also useful.
Personally I start with the browser's search field, but then (dunno why) if I need to make some changes I do it in google page itself (about 50% of the time, I'd estimate). So I think It will just annoy me to have Google try to give me results a fraction of a second earlier like an overly keen student: I personally don't feel the need and instead I feel it will disrupt my thought flow.
That said, I am not criticising Google. I think it's one impressive piece of technology and much kudos to succeed. And as you pointed out there will be many people out there who will be able to add this to their searching procedures, and for the rest of us we can always disable it.
The shortest link to the explanation, for those of us who don't have javascript turned on by default and want to read about it, or who don't see the new interface:
"Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8."
Works with some swear words in Italian too. Wonder if they compiled a list or if they've got an algorithm that says "wait, this is about to return some naughty results".
Q: If an offensive or lewd word is a fraction of my query, will Google push these results in front of me as I type?
A: As always, we provide options to filter the content you see in search. You can choose to set SafeSearch to filter out explicit content, and parents can lock SafeSearch to the strict setting. In addition, autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech.
You basically have to press enter if you want to search for a term with possible pornographic, violent or hateful content (that’s what they just said in their Q&A). That seems like a sensible solution to me. Safe Search doesn’t figure into it.
and if it doesn't autocomplete in the plain old search suggestions feature, then it will not appear in the instant results, because these are precomputed results for queries that are generated by the suggestion engine.
So how long before we can buy our way to the top of the search term suggestions? What kind of analytics can you do about how streaming search changes the way people compose their keywords? It's an interesting new feature.
I actually wrote a post a while back about Google's search term suggestions [1]. Most interesting fact I found was that Facebook actually has one of the top-ten suggestions for the letter "w" because of people entering "www.facebook.com" into Google so often.
I'm really curious how they will count ad impressions in this new system. Can anyone find any comments on that? Google is CPC, but the number of impressions has a dramatic impact on price.
When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:
* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page
(a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing
Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three
seconds.
It has the potential to drastically alter search, which thus would drastically alter PPC. The likeliest negative outcome is the gradual disappearance of any traffic driven from long-tail search keywords.
Not sure if this was covered elsewhere, but this actually changes the SEO game in a subtle way. imagine you could rank for the term online deg but NOT online degree.
SEO's rejoice, this could be profitable for consultants and linkbuilders.
I'm curious if users will actually change their behavior because of this though.
For example, if you decide you want to go to google.com to search for "online degree", are you likely going to stop in the middle of typing your phrase when you notice some results appear?
For me the lag between typing and displaying of results seems a little too slow for this to really happen.
Sure, if you can touch type. There's still millions of people hunting and pecking, especially on mobile devices. It's certainly plausible that people will stop to look at the results.
One of the articles I read talked about Google mentioning this....their research showed an average pause of 300ms between keystrokes (crazy!) but only 30ms between eye saccades, so users are looking around 10 times for every keystroke.
If I'm hunting and pecking, I'm looking at the keyboard, not the screen. Those saccades are most likely happening during the typist's search for the next key to hit.
Did you try it? It doesn't search for the current search term, it searches for its current best guess. The instant search results for "online deg" and "online degree" are identical, because it's the same search. (I compared it to a direct search for "online deg" and it's not the same search.) There's no optimization for "online deg" to be made.
I don't think there's very much SEO implication here at all, actually, as the goal was already to be the top hit for a common Google search, and common Google searches will be what Google Instant already prefers.
In the live webcast they said that they use auto-complete to populate the instant results. Typing "online deg" auto-completes to "online degrees", so that's the query used to generate the instant results.
"online deg" probably isn't the best example, but there are still going to be cases where a prefix autocompletes to a different target than the final intended search, that SEOs for the final intended search will want to start ranking more highly for. Finding those cases will be part of the fun.
Ask it another way: do you think a service that shows what the current google autocompletions are for every prefix of a given term becomes more or less interesting to SEOs after this announcement?
I think what ruby above is saying is that with enough websites, urls and content, an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword.
Google auto-completes brands and keywords that only have 2 or 3 website references (I know of a site in stealth and I just tried it, and it worked. Google has indexed their homepage and title, and as I typed it in it auto-completed their name, with only a single website to reference).
"an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword."
If you have that much power, you probably have a better way to spend it. Also I would bet that suggest keywords come from user searches themeselves, not the web. That's why I suspect the impact of this is probably relatively minimal.
Call me crazy, but I think Google just might have considered the SEO impact before deploying this. If it's not literally on a checklist somewhere for deployment of search features, I'd be stunned.
Actually there is a big section of the SEO world that focuses on the long tail keywords. This change is going to harm those folks, but up the reward for anyone that does rank highly for the frequently used terms. Good and bad, hopefully this will lead to less spammy junk, but also reduces the amount of real estate available for new entrants (or at least makes it more pricey).
for example, just type 'degree ' (make sure there's a space - you get results for "degree symbol" (or at least I do) - now all i have to do is rank for "degree symbol" and put links to my online degree affiliate links...
there are certainly keyword results that are a) in autocomplete, b) substrings of keyword results also in autocomplete, c) easier to rank for than the longer phrase.
I think topic-modeling (a la the Latent Dirichlet Allocation article posted about seomoz the other day) will make this difficult to do (at least without confusing the people you want to convert).
I like the idea that it's the same search for both - think about the number of terms that would bring back adult content based on the prefix, but given the entire term, are something entirely innocent.
Why would I want Google to begin searching at 'he' if I'm looking for 'hello world'? Will the instant search list relevant results so early on, so as to save me from typing the whole term?
Smart AI + Lazy Humans = Feelings of Hollywood sci-fi being right
The smart thing about Google is that their progress is incremental in the sense nobody will realize before it takes over their lives. In a way it already has, but imagine your relationship with Google in 10 years down the line. You will be literally hooked to it and it will know what you are going to do next. I just wish Don't be evil stays ingrained in that AI :)
One of the main issues for advertisers (as far as I can tell) is that this increases competition for the keywords which Google predicts first, and decreases traffic for the other keywords.
This already happened with Google Suggest, but I think that Instant search will result in even more users only interacting with the first suggestion.
For example, the term "social networking" will now get far more traffic than "social network", because it appears first.
If I wanted to search for "social network", I can't just type it, I have to type it, press down, then press enter. Otherwise, I'm still searching for "social networking".
It creates more of a winner-takes-all market in search terms.
You can also press the Delete key to cut short a search. I would prefer to hit space multiple times and get the same behavior.
I tried searching for wtf. It lengthens the term to wtfismygearscore, which appears to be some WoW tool. What I don't like about the tool is that it makes my searches too specific! It doesn't know when to quit and the completion is often longer than I want it to be.
No you don’t. Type “social network” (no quotation marks) and press enter, Google will then search only for what you typed, without the suggestion. It’s not exactly obvious that you can do that but it makes sense. You can use Instant just as you used Google before and still get the same behavior, they seem to have taken great care of making this behave exactly like before (i.e. typing something and pressing enter will only search for exactly what you typed, pressing enter adds an entry to your browser’s history just as before, etc.).
And it doesn’t break the back button! I was a bit worried about that but you can either make a ‘snapshot’ of the current search results by pressing enter or clicking the search button (just like before only without page reload) or by just waiting a short time (about three seconds), presumably so as to not clutter up your browser’s history.
It’s a really smooth experience and they seem to have though of everything.
Managing browser history was the #1, #2, and #3 issue I had to deal with when I was doing a similar project. If you are very careful and clever (I recommend the jQuery history plugin) you can make it work properly, but it's a headache.
Google has made it very slick, although they at least have a fallback: "oops, Google Instant won't work on this browser (cough, IE) so here's Google Brewed." If you bill your service as instant search, you need to work with even lame browsers.
It looks like zqqx is (for whatever reason) one of the words for which instant search is disabled. Try the four letter word starting with f, you will see exactly the same thing.
I could imagine using it in some situations though, when I am really digging for some information and not expecting my query to bring my desired result to the top few spots.
interesting UI issue/inconsistency (in Chrome)... when pressing tab, it can either complete the current word/phrase or move to the X, so <enter> can either do nothing or clear the search box
I for one turn off google suggestions on every new pc/browser I use, it is a distraction to me and actually causes me to type slower. Maybe because I've been in front of a computer constantly for 15 years but I can type my term much faster than being distracted by results and clicking on the dropdown for them.
I just wish I could disable this account wide so every time I clean my cookies/cache in Firefox I don't have to go back to preferences and turn it off again.
OTOH, with this feature sometimes you are going to change what you're searching before finishing it, because you can already see you're going the wrong way.
Well, it's impressively fast, however, I'm not sure I will ever get to use it considering I do most of my search from the Google Chrome Omnibox and very rarely visit the actual google homepage...
My question is how will this and previous auto-complete moves by Google effect the "long tail" search market. Will this reduce the number of truly unique queries and instead group people into already existing term categories? I know auto complete has been in effect for a while, but I wonder if this will only make it even more effective, thereby changing user behavior and simply re-enforcing the already existing terms.
yes, similar here. Safari 5 & Chrome don't have it enabled. Firefox does. I thought it was related to the use of encrypted.google.com or customized search, but it doesn't seem like it. At least not directly (and incognito mode doesn't help). And I don't want to clear my google cookies which might solve the problem.
226 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 1305 ms ] threadPersonally I start with the browser's search field, but then (dunno why) if I need to make some changes I do it in google page itself (about 50% of the time, I'd estimate). So I think It will just annoy me to have Google try to give me results a fraction of a second earlier like an overly keen student: I personally don't feel the need and instead I feel it will disrupt my thought flow.
That said, I am not criticising Google. I think it's one impressive piece of technology and much kudos to succeed. And as you pointed out there will be many people out there who will be able to add this to their searching procedures, and for the rest of us we can always disable it.
It's win-win. :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 <- This one
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First
http://www.google.com/instant/
"Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8."
Q: If an offensive or lewd word is a fraction of my query, will Google push these results in front of me as I type?
A: As always, we provide options to filter the content you see in search. You can choose to set SafeSearch to filter out explicit content, and parents can lock SafeSearch to the strict setting. In addition, autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech.
[1] http://www.alfajango.com/blog/google-one-letter-suggestions/
Excerpt:
When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:
SEO's rejoice, this could be profitable for consultants and linkbuilders.
For example, if you decide you want to go to google.com to search for "online degree", are you likely going to stop in the middle of typing your phrase when you notice some results appear?
For me the lag between typing and displaying of results seems a little too slow for this to really happen.
edit: ie not everyone is typing as quickly as you are
I don't think there's very much SEO implication here at all, actually, as the goal was already to be the top hit for a common Google search, and common Google searches will be what Google Instant already prefers.
Ask it another way: do you think a service that shows what the current google autocompletions are for every prefix of a given term becomes more or less interesting to SEOs after this announcement?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I clicked on it because it was so much funnier than the rest of them.
Turns out: affiliate link.
Or some sort of americanized japanese dating porn or something ... couldn't really tell.
Still. I definitely agree that it completely changes the SEO game.
Google auto-completes brands and keywords that only have 2 or 3 website references (I know of a site in stealth and I just tried it, and it worked. Google has indexed their homepage and title, and as I typed it in it auto-completed their name, with only a single website to reference).
If you have that much power, you probably have a better way to spend it. Also I would bet that suggest keywords come from user searches themeselves, not the web. That's why I suspect the impact of this is probably relatively minimal.
Call me crazy, but I think Google just might have considered the SEO impact before deploying this. If it's not literally on a checklist somewhere for deployment of search features, I'd be stunned.
there are certainly keyword results that are a) in autocomplete, b) substrings of keyword results also in autocomplete, c) easier to rank for than the longer phrase.
The smart thing about Google is that their progress is incremental in the sense nobody will realize before it takes over their lives. In a way it already has, but imagine your relationship with Google in 10 years down the line. You will be literally hooked to it and it will know what you are going to do next. I just wish Don't be evil stays ingrained in that AI :)
This already happened with Google Suggest, but I think that Instant search will result in even more users only interacting with the first suggestion.
For example, the term "social networking" will now get far more traffic than "social network", because it appears first. If I wanted to search for "social network", I can't just type it, I have to type it, press down, then press enter. Otherwise, I'm still searching for "social networking".
It creates more of a winner-takes-all market in search terms.
I tried searching for wtf. It lengthens the term to wtfismygearscore, which appears to be some WoW tool. What I don't like about the tool is that it makes my searches too specific! It doesn't know when to quit and the completion is often longer than I want it to be.
Strange.
It’s a really smooth experience and they seem to have though of everything.
Google has made it very slick, although they at least have a fallback: "oops, Google Instant won't work on this browser (cough, IE) so here's Google Brewed." If you bill your service as instant search, you need to work with even lame browsers.
zqqx
and after the 'x' is typed, no instant results appear. However, Pressing 'enter' to submit your search will show you the full results.
A new Google game: what's the shortest non-blacklisted key sequence that returns 0 instant results.
I could imagine using it in some situations though, when I am really digging for some information and not expecting my query to bring my desired result to the top few spots.
* 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.
Does anyone know which are these new technologies?
(I apologize profusely, I just couldn't resist.)
I just wish I could disable this account wide so every time I clean my cookies/cache in Firefox I don't have to go back to preferences and turn it off again.
Also, it has tab-complete.