If you’ve been on Google Search anytime in the past week you may have noticed that your computer’s been acting really strange… Links and ads have been switching in and out as you type, even before you hit the search key! What’s up with that? Well, you can go grab your laptop out of the trashcan because there isn’t anything wrong with it; you’ve just experienced the brand new Google Instant!
What is Google Instant?
Google Instant is their brand new enhancement to their search engine that shows you search results the second you start typing. That’s right ladies and gentlemen you don’t even have to hit the search key. Not only that, they’ve enhanced the prediction features to help guide you if you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for, or if you just don’t feel like typing the whole thing out J. (No need to worry, this does not affect the ranking of search results).
Check out this neat little video by Google to show you what Instant is all about:
Why did they do this?
The ultimate goal is to improve the over-all user experience on Google, shorten the time it takes to do a search (according to Google it can save 2- 5 seconds per search), and guide searchers who don’t know exactly what they’re looking for in the right direction.
I know what you’re thinking, 2-5 seconds doesn’t seem like very much time, but Google puts it into perspective with this fun fact, “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” Now that is something to think about.
For all the people out there who don’t want to save some time and want the old Google back, don’t worry, you have the ability to turn the instant feature off at any time.
Thanks Google! Kind of…
Google has really thought this one through, and from a consumer’s perspective this is a great improvement that can really enhance the search engine experience.
But let’s not forget that any changes Google makes greatly affects any SEO/SEM agendas (they love to keep us on our toes), and this change has thrown a little wrench into the well-oiled machine that is SEO/SEM.
Stay tuned to hear about the affects Google Instant has on PPC and Search Engine Optimization.
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