Google Instant. Glorified auto-fill?

On the surface, yes.

We’re going to take a break away from the world of paintball for this blog and talk about the introduction of Google Instant, the latest update the search giants have on offer. Currently rolled out state-side, it wont be added to google.co.uk for another week and this gives our web development guys a chance to get to grips with it and decide what changes need to be made, if any at all.

If you head on over to google.com/ncr (type it in just like that, the /ncr text ensures you aren’t redirected to your native Google domain) and begin typing a search term, you’ll be surprised to see that with each push of the keyboard, the search results are updated in real-time. Exciting sutff eh? Well, over the last 24 hours there has been a flurry of articles flying around the blogosphere; some declaring doomsday for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) while others are simply taking it as another paddle in the sea on searching.

Here at Skirmish, we find it an exciting introduction and something that won’t KILL SEO!! but will certainly become a game changer and ensure we’re kept busy while we optimize our sites for those short-tail and one word keywords. It will be interesting to see how companies react to this change and how they will deal with the lack of traffic for much of their long-tail keywords.

A good article over at ZDNet.com talks about the Google Instant Alphabet; Pressing, for example, P in Google Instant brings up Pandora as the numero uno in the results. This is the Golden Crown of SEO. It has to be right? It’ll certainly provide a great fight for those one letter keywords. But will it really have any effect on others? Well, no. What if I was going to search for Paintball and typing in P brings up Pandora, then we’re pretty sure you won’t click on it. Also, if you search for just P or for Pandora then your search results are going to be the same either way, it just provides a quicker search-to-click ratio.

This update is the total contrast to Google Caffaine; this has everything to do with user interaction and nothing to do with SEO. Over next few months, user’s will re-train themselves in terms of searching and it’s time to get cosy with Google Analytics and see if there really will be any changes, or if it really is over the top auto-fill.