The need for speed with Google Instant
Google Instant is a product that has speed at the very heart of everything it does and where every second counts.
During its launch at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, the company threw a slew of figures at journalists, analysts and bloggers that showed the average user takes nine seconds to type in a search query and another 15 seconds to choose which result to open.
Google Instant aims to put a rocket under those figures by dishing up results as you type.
In a quick one-letter experiment, when I typed in the letter "A" I was offered a choice of "Amazon, AOL or Apple" on a drop-down list. For "B" I got "Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transport) and Best Buy". "C" was Craisglist and "D" it was DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).
All very random and quick but Google's head of search Marissa Mayer told me one-letter queries are not the greatest way to yield the best results.
"Typing one letter doesn't give the greatest signal of what is intended so popular companies may well pop up as the offering," said Ms Mayer.
"The first letter game is fun. We call it the alphabet according to Google Instant. It is
actually probably better in terms of an experience if you give us two or three letters. We are able to predict that much better what you are likely to be looking for."
Instead of hitting return/enter or clicking the search button, Ms Mayer hit the tab button.
Using Google Instant can shave as little as two seconds and as much as five off a search query. All those seconds add up.
"With Google Instant, we estimate that we'll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!" said Ms Mayer.
If you are interested that is 3.5 billion seconds a day and 350 million hours a year.
Naturally Google wants you to spend all that saved time searching using its search engine and not wandering off to Facebook to get answers through your social graph or going to the likes of Twitter and using its search function.
But seriously, will a second or two here and there really change user behaviour?
Believe it or not, every second really does matter, said Ms Mayer, who told me about a failed experiment back in 1999/2000 that Google conducted into the number of blue links or search results that it delivered.
"We did the experiment and it was disastrous. People who got 20 results by default searched a lot less and people who were getting 30 results were searching 25% less in six weeks."
Ms Mayer said they scratched their heads trying to work out the root of the problem because users had said they actually wanted more links to show up on the page. They poured over the results and the answer was soon revealed in the data.
"We took the logs and tried to understand how the experiment group was different from the control and the answer was time. It took us about 500 milliseconds more to do 30 results instead of 10.
"But if you can imagine 500 miliseconds of increased latency is about 25% of Google search traffic over 6 weeks. They probably weren't able to articulate that 500 millisecond difference yet it made a big difference in their overall behaviour. We think speed really matters."
The hyperbole surrounding the launch of Google Instant was impressive. Ms Mayer referred to it as a "fundamental shift" and a "quantum leap" in search.
"There have been other large changes in search. Google PageRank for example, that ability to get first results right in a lot of cases. Our launch of universal search in May 2007 was another such change - this idea we would have mixed media result pages and when we launched we were probably only triggering universal search on 3 to 5 % of queries and today we serve about 40% of our queries with universal results.
"When we look at the future of search there are generally three axis these things progress along. Interactions. Comprehensiveness. Understanding.
"For a lot of the features and a lot of the changes we make, they really only move forward on one axis at a time. Google Instant is interesting because it actually moves the ball forward on all three of those areas. It is a totally new way of interacting with the search engine."
A number of the analysts and bloggers I spoke to at the event were pretty positive about Google Instant but one or two voiced concern about what it will mean to search engine optimisation - the art or science of choosing the right keywords so a site or link floats to the top of the results page.
Industry watcher Steve Rubel reckons Google Instant is an SEO killer.
"No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviours."
This means if results for your site are on page two, users who might have previously scrolled through to get the answer they are looking for are unlikely to go past that first page as they alter their search query on the fly.
Matt Cutts at Google who blogs about SEO said Google Instant does not sound the death knell for SEO but it will have an impact.
"I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it's possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson's blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.
" But that doesn't mean that SEO will die. I've said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen."
Of course if you don't like Google Instant, you can always turn it off.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~38~RS~)
Comments
I love it !!
I was thinking of sending special gift to someone and I typed and it showed exactly what was I looking for. Super stuff. Not great if we have lower bandwidth, though :-)
Regards.
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I have had a play with it and I am impressed, although it is a little disorientating when you use it the first time, you're not expecting the results to appear like that...
The interesting question, will be whether every other search engine now has to follow, and release their own...
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Woo! 5 whole seconds saved search time!
Courtesy of The Daily Mash: (http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3076&Itemid=35)
GOOGLE'S new Instant search engine means consumers can finally start using the fraction of a second it used to take them to get a result.
The company estimates the average user performs 12 searches a day, meaning they will soon have more than nine extra seconds to devote to work or leisure interests.
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This is a blatant attempt by google to increase their adwords revenue (sponsored ad listings). By intervening in this way, users are more likely to be distracted mid sentence from what they were going to search and more likely to click on ads which are displayed above the fold after typing in the first word.
What this means is that smaller website owners, even if they appear on the first page of the natural listings, will no longer be viewed but squeezed out by the big brands who will be at the very top of the results and by the sponsored ad payers. It will also mean that the average bid price for single keywords will increase as those single keywords become more sought after - more money for google.
Nice if you are google, but it will kill small businesses and limit the diversity of the results displayed. With google services taking over the natural results, it's looking more like a classified ads engine than a search engine!
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The only reason google are rolling this out is to try to extort more advertising revenue.
Cue a whole new round of 'who comes top of the instant search lists'
Cynical? Not at all - it's Googles business model
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I am quite disappointed that this article links to the 'SEO is dead' blog post by Steve Rubel which, as anyone who knows anything about SEO will know, is completely false. Just read some of the comments underneath to see what I am talking about.
In actual fact I strongly suspect that Mr Rubel himself knows what he has written is false and that the piece was intended as 'link bait' which has clearly worked as he has got a link from the BBC out of it.
For a more considered opinion of the impact this will have on SEO and Pay Per Click I would take a look at the following blog post:
http://www.returnondigital.com/blog/google-instant-our-thoughts-on-this-evolving-story
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This is excellent!
This will definitely same everyone loads of time!
Google is always ahead of its main rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft and I expect that to continue
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There are major implications of this change - not just shaving a few seconds - none of which seem you seem to have identified.
The first is that Google is now devoting a much larger percentage of screen space to sponsored results i.e. the paid ads. The Google Instant box takes up space that was previously used for "organic" (genuine) results. On a 1280x800 screen you now get only 2.5 organic results and a whole 9 paid ads above the fold. Shoving more ads in people's faces will have a significant impact on Google's revenues.
This will also impact on advertisers featuring in those spots who get charged per click. They'll now get a lot more clickthroughs of their ads, many from people who aren't looking to buy and who just happened to click through because they weren't presented with the normal range of organic results.
It will impact on SEOs and in a way Matt Cutts is unlikely to disclose. Where it was previously difficult for a low quality site to rank at #1 for a competitive term, the site can now optimise for and rank easily for incomplete versions of the term. Provided they had the full term in their page title and description, the user could be distracted into clicking the "transitionary results" Google showed them rather than on completing their search. The user wouldget spammy sites, it's a lower quality experience for them.
There are implications for IT staff of companies who need to track visitors coming to their sites. Metrics will now be skewed for the referrer term/s on which they are getting traffic.
Google now censors all adult sites out of the results pages as an innocent search could throw up adult sites in the transitionary results. That's good for most users of the search engine who want adult sites filtered out. But it's Google that decides which site is an adult site and innocent sites could be affected. In any case, anything that smacks of censorship is viewed harshly in many quarters and Google, in particular, has had issues surrounding censorship. Those were mainly with censorship of what sites it allowed to advertise. This is now censoring of the results and could open a new can of worms.
We've been discussing Google Instant at our webmaster forums: http://experienced-people.net/forums/showthread.php/1527
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I think it would be nice if the meaning of 'SEO' were explained?
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Google Instant is very presumptuois.
It seems to know where I am going before I even get going!
I don't like it one bit. No, that's not quite right; actually, I hate the thing!
Maybe I'm just slow and plodding by nature, but the fit between me and Google Instant is less than fitting.
On the other hand, maybe I'm just too ingenious for the thing. How can Google Instant possibly know where the mind of homo sapiens sapiens (me) wants to go? I can't believe that the complexity of my thoughts have all been predicted by some "program".
Either I'm not handling Google Instant properly, or Google Instant is not good at guesing where I want to go after I type just a few letters. e.g. I want to find financial institution. I type fin...and before I can get further I've got assorted and several fish fin entries, which may or may not correspond to my opinion of financial institutions, but certainly wasn't what I was looking for.
Google Instant presumes to know what I want, which is for the most part not correct, and a time waster.
Can't stand the thing. Turned off.
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Who would have thought that 2 to 5 seconds would be such a monumental addition to my day? Why, if I spent fifty years doing ten 3.5-second searches a day every day, I would save about seven whole days of searching over a lifetime!
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The need for speed is only for the provider as online data transfer costs are then reduced. For the user, who may have a limited download package....
If for every letter I type, there is a whole page of new data sent to me, I will be charged a fortune off my limited package for every downloaded page.
Whereas before, I would not get any download unit I had clicked the return AFTER my completed query.
They are hoping to give you minimum selection whilst transferring the usage costs!
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This is really a scam. Because there is a complete search for every new letter entered, an average six letter word will generate 3 useless searches before it returns the one I want. So? Well, Google can claim it is more popular because it is preforming more searches than its competitors, even though these are useless throw away searches that just waste my bandwidth and their servers time.
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I haven't found it particularly helpful so far. I just did a search for 'electric scooter': Yes, it successfully predicted the word 'electric' after I'd only typed three letters, but none of the choices it offered me was 'electric scooter'. I still had to continue typing as far as 'electric sc' for it to offer me 'electric scooter'. It's not like I was able to do anything useful (other than breathe) with the time saved. Perhaps, over the course of my entire life, this might save me a few minutes, and, when I'm on my deathbed, breathing my last gasp, I'll give thanks and praise Google for those extra precious few minutes of life they gave me. Then again, perhaps not.
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I have tried it - very neat.
However, it wont change my searching since that relies on the actual results, not how they are rendered.
The one joke about technology is that speed may look impressive, but can often be a waste of time. The human on the end of the process still wants to work at their own speed; needs to work at their own speed, indeed.
If technology produces something faster than we can use it, then it is fun, but worthless.
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BluesBerry wrote:
Google Instant is very presumptuois.
It seems to know where I am going before I even get going!
######
I am reminded of the elevators in Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
They were able to work out when you wanted an elevator before you knew you wanted it, so would be waiting for you ready when you pressed the button. "...thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previoiusly forced to do whilst waiting for elevators."
Perhaps programmers should be forced to read the poem:
"What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare?"
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This is an improvement, but how many will benefit?
I am not a typist but have many years using a couple of fingers at reasonable speed. However I still need to look at the keyboard.
I doubt I am alone.
The mouse solved the basic problem for new users years ago, this issue is unresolved and I dont think saying learn to type by feel is a realistic answer, my keyboard does not even have raised pips on the 'home' keys.
Simon.
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The premise of Google Instant is great, but no one is looking at it. There is a very simple fact that users look at their keyboard as they type and are unaware of the miraculous time-saving instant results appearing. No one types a letter, looks up, types another letter, looks up again etc etc. We tested it with eye tracking software and not one user clicked on the new results http://blog.essentialtravel.co.uk/no-one-is-looking-at-google-instant.html I think the real point here is firstly, will it change user behvaiour over time? And secondly, I suspect motivation behind this change has far more to do with increasing paid search exposure (and revenue for Google) than benefit for users.
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What's amazing about this whole Google Instant excitement is the fact that very few noticed it's nothing new. Yahoo tried it FIVE YEARS AGO. There's still a copy of their Yahoo Instant beta on archive.org: [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
It's exactly the same thing as Google Instant and here's an article from 2006 about LiveSearch (Yahoo Instant): http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060510-085525
We've been discussing Google Instant at our webmaster forums: http://experienced-people.net/forums/showthread.php/1527
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