Google Instant And The Power Of Suggestion

Google Instant And The Power Of Suggestion. It’s going to be a long time (weeks or months) until anyone has a complete understanding of how Google Instant will change search and search marketing.

The change Google has made isn’t just to the user interface. They’ve changed how search works by dramatically increasing the power of Google Suggestions. And most importantly they’ve changed the search experience which will undoubtedly change the way people behave and react to the results they get from Google.

Google Instant And The Power Of Suggestion

Search marketers—of both the paid and organic varieties—are going to feel the impact of all these changes.

Instant suggestions

Watching a Google demo of Instant, or when giving it a casual try yourself, you can’t help but be struck by the way the screen is constantly updating and adapting as you type. But if you pay close attention to what is really happening you’ll notice that all the action on the page is driven by the fact that Google Suggest is constantly executing on its top suggestion—a suggestion that usually changes (but not always) after each new character is typed.

Last night my friend needed to gather and print some articles for a homework project. Using his query as an example—a search for “marine pollution”—let’s see how Google Instant really works and begin thinking about the implications for search marketers.

For the sake of this examination, we’ll type slowly enough to allow the screen to react to every single character. In the real world, people don’t type that slow, and at least in my experience Google Instant either needs some time or is engineered to avoid the pointless flashing of results. So many searchers wouldn’t see all of the steps we’re about to review. Read More