Google has always been an innovator. Of course, they’ve done their share of following too. But in the core business where Google makes its money, it is an innovator. Google Instant is the latest development by the search engine to maintain its leading edge and competitiveness over other search engines, particularly Bing.

So what is Google Instant? In a word, the search engine has changed its search feature to give you results as you type them in. The net savings, in time, to you is a few seconds for each search. But if you perform a lot of searches throughout the day then you’ll save a lot of seconds. Seems like such a small deal, but when you go to use Bing it will seem awfully slow.

Looking around the web, I’ve noticed a few other headlines about Google Instant. I think you’ll want to read some of these.

• Headlines and Quick Takes – Rather than link to all the same content as John Battelle, I’ll just link to his blog. Read some of the stories he is linking to.
• How Google Instant Changes SEO – In other words, SEO isn’t irrelevant but, hey … you’ll have to read the story.
• How Google Instant Will Change Local Search – Mike Blumenthal and Aaron Wall seem to agree. But Mike provides a good example.
• Google Instant And The Long Tail – Maybe SEO isn’t dead, but Google Cache is saying that maybe the long tail is dead.
• The good, the bad and the ugly – WebProNews makes the announcement. Some things that people are saying about Google Instant as reported by WebProNews.
• Google Instant and Bob Dylan – Google’s new TV ad, featuring Bob Dylan.

I think the important thing to think about here, from a marketing perspective, is how will this change search behavior? If it changes search behavior in any way, and we won’t know for at least a week how it will change, then search marketing behavior must change with it. I say give it a month before making any judgments either way.

Tags: google, Google Instant

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 9:52 am and is filed under search engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.