Fishburn Hedges

09.09.2010 | (2 comments)

If you’re one of the two-thirds of people traversing the web using a modern browser, and you are logged into a Google account, then you’ll see a new-look Google this morning.  The search engine has launched Google Instant, a service that provides live search results as you type in your query.

As the launch video says, “you don’t even need to hit return any more”.

How useful is this really? It’s a legitimate question, because even the most webby types can’t make more than a few dozen searches in an average day, suggesting this new service may save them anything between one and three minutes.  Hardly something to write home about, perhaps.

Information at your fingertips

But on the other hand, there’s something very natural about finding search results before you’ve clearly thought about what you’re going to search for.  You just start typing and – hey, there you go, a lot of results that are probably not far wrong appear on the screen. After just a few minutes of using it, I have found myself changing my search terms, depending on what’s appearing on the screen in real time.

That immersive experience might become quite addictive – a possibility that will no doubt concern Microsoft’s Bing, which has been gradually eating into Google’s market share of late.

Search Engine Optimisation In Trouble

What impact will it have on organisations that hope to promote themselves online?

People have recognised for some time that the growth in realtime information on the web degrades the value of traditional search engine optimisation.  Here’s the problem in a nutshell. Once, a website laden with carefully chosen keywords would perform relatively well when people searched for those terms. The other main factor was “relevance”, and this was largely a function of how many authoritative websites suggested people visit yours (using hyperlinks).

Now, thanks to the growth of realtime information (such as blog posts, tweets, status updates, comments and videos shot at no expense and published online), the relevance of a site increasingly depends on the recency of the information on the site. Google openly described in some detail earlier this year how it hopes to head in this direction.

What Instant Means For Company Websites

Google Instant may well be the first nail in the coffin for traditional SEO, which was essentially built on the principle of “gaming” the system by, for example, embedding keywords in spurious ways (such as in white text on white backgrounds) or encouraging links from other sites by publishing attention-grabbing material (link baiting).

No doubt some very clever people will work out clever ways to game Google Instant.  But for most organisations wishing to communicate with an audience online, this is another reminder that simply building a static website is not enough.  Your website is just one channel to reach your audience, and it, along with others such as Twitter or Facebook, needs to be tended constantly to remain relevant.

Irrelevance is fast becoming a danger for many organisations still wedded to a traditional communication mindset.

When Instant Search Goes Mobile

Other exciting prospects are opened up by the ability to deliver instant search results to a mobile device, as these can be filtered by your own search history and geography. This is what Google CEO Eric Schmidt referred to this week as ‘augmented humanity’.

In his words, from the consumer electronics show IFA, in Berlin:

“When I walk down the streets of Berlin, I like history. What I want is for my computer — my smartphone — to be doing searches constantly. Did you know? Did you know? Did you know? This occurred here. This occurred there. Because it knows who I am, it knows what I care about, and it knows roughly where I am.

“This notion of autonomous search — the ability to tell me things I didn't know but am probably very interested in — is the next great stage, in my view, of search.”

Now, it’s over to the privacy campaigners to debate that one…

Posted by Peter Sigrist

 

BlogAuthor on 09.09.2010

Thanks for the comment Alex. I didn't mean to be pejorative when I wrote "gaming the system", rather state a fact. What I meant is this: SEO starts with how search engines work, and attempts to engineer solutions backward from that in order to push some results higher up in the search results. I'm not saying it hurts anyone, but "gaming the system" is precisely what is being done.

However, your's is a fair comment, because I didn't mean to imply that all SEO companies use "black hat" methods (although I've never met one that didn't, and I started working closely with them - doing the PR for one of the biggest - a decade ago).

Personally, I think it's a good thing that the best way to improve online visibility is simply to publish information and engage with your audience. Using arbitrary techniques to measure the value of web pages based on words only brings out the best/worst of human ingenuity.

Indeed, I'm very happy that the PR and SEO industries are becoming indistinguishable. Not there yet, by any stretch, but getting there.

Anyway, this is clearly a discussion that needs to continue, so let's make sure we do!

Alex Pearmain on 09.09.2010

Agree with the mobile points.

On some of the others, however - think it misses the distinction between PPC and organic SEO - no reason this should adversely impact organic SEO. If I search for 'cheap mortgage deals' on instant or traditional search, the challenge remains the same for the SEO art On the PPC front, all the doom and gloom blog posts seem somewhat unlikely to me. After all, Google are hardly going to spit in their own soup and release a product which decimates their main revenue stream.

Also, and I'm by no means an apologist for the SEO industry, but describing their purpose as 'gaming the system' is as two-dimensional as saying PR's origins are in deceiving the public. That can be the case, but generally both industries are two sides of the same coin; ensuring awareness of brands to their audiences.