Google Instant – Thoughts on the Interface and What This Means for SEO

If you haven’t heard, Google just released their Instant Search (called “Google Instant”). This gives you search results in real-time, as you type. This is a way of searching that’s becoming increasingly common. In this post, I’ll share some thoughts on the Goolge’s new interface, a few tips and tricks for Power Users, and thoughts on what this might mean for SEO.

Introducing “Search as you Type”

The Basics

Search as you type does exactly what it claims: while typing, Google automatically starts a search for you on the term you’re searching for and displays the results. All without you ever typing “Enter”.

Google doesn’t just start searching for the first letters you type, though; it searches for the best match to what you’re typing (this will come up later when we talk about SEO).

For example, look at the following search:

The black letters are what I’ve typed so far. The gray letters are the letters Google assumes I’ll type next (the best match). As you can see, Google has performed the search based on the best match. Pressing “Enter” will force Google to perform a regular search. In this case, pressing “Enter” will make Google search for “stac”.

Problems with the Interface

Is the fact that Google searches for the best match clear enough? It took someone pointing it out for me to understand how it worked. I’m not sure this will be clear to regular users, negating the benefit of saving people keystrokes. More importantly, I’m worried that people will enter a few letters which have a best match, but will want to perform a search for those letters, and not the best match. Will they realize they need to press “Enter” for Google to do what they want?

A related problem is what happens when a user presses “Enter”. The page is grayed out for a split-second, and then the search is carried out. Does this make it clear what’s going on to users? Or will they enter a few letters (e.g. “tet”), see the results they want (“Tetris”), press “Enter” out of habit, then watch their results disappear.

Interface Features for Power Users

After messing around with the interface for a bit, I found some tricks for Power Users. If you have any more tricks, please list them in the comments.

• Pressing  ”delete” will delete Google’s guess, execute the search, but keep you in the search bar so you can type more text. This is the same as hitting “Enter”, except that “Enter” will cause the search bar to lose focus.
• Typing letters, even when the search bar is out of focus, will type the letters into the search bar. It will even add a space at the end of the last word automatically for you. I love this feature; I’m not sure why they didn’t have it in the old interface. It means I get to keep my hands on the keyboard just a little more than before.
• Hitting “Tab” or the “Right Arrow” will cause Google’s  ”best match” guess to be entered for you. Useful if Google guessed right, but you want to add more search terms.

What Google Instant means for SEO

I’m no SEO expert, and I’m sure that the real impact on SEO won’t be understood for a while. Having said that, the most important Search Engine, by far, has just fundamentally changed the way search works. It’s clear that this will have an impact on SEO. This is obviously something Google has considered long and hard – they’d have to be crazy not to. But human ingenuity will always find a way to take advantage of a new situation, given enough time, and I’m sure this will happen here.

A simple example: best matches for certain letters suddenly become much more important. If I set out looking for a “Volkswagen”, and enter “vol”, I’ll get the following result:

The top ad on the right reads “A Luxury Car means Volvo S40″. Obviously, not the result Volkswagen are hoping for.

In fact, now getting things to be best matches matters a great deal. I’m not even sure there has been work done on understanding the algorithm Google uses for guessing best matches. It doesn’t look like it’s just which search has the most results: “Stack Overflow” has just over 2,000,000 results, while “stack on”, the next best guess, clocks in at 24,000,000.

But just like the search results themselves, how Google decides on a best match will start to be studied and gamed, now that it’s gained such importance.

Conclusion

For me, the bottom line is that I love this move. It’s bold, considering that Google is messing with their most important property. But it’s a step in the right direction – a much better, more modern interface for search. Time will tell how much of an impact this has on SEO, and how the majority of people will take to the new interface. But all things considered, I think Google has done an amazing job.