The search world turned upside down Wednesday when Google unveiled their new instant format. Since that time, there’s been a lot of speculation about the implications in terms of e-marketing. Here’s an informative article that offers a rational perspective on this highly contentious issue. The author predicts that this move will bolster paid content, which is bad news for anyone outside of Google’s AdWords network. I believe he’s correct in assuming that Google would not have launched this program otherwise.
Personally, I don’t care for this change. I think it’s pretty presumptuous of Google to think that they can accurately predict my behavior, especially since I use their site mostly for research purposes. Over the past couple of days, they’ve only managed to get it right once. That’s not a very impressive track record and it’s not saving me any time. During the release press conference, Google explained that the instant feature would reduce the amount of time spent obtaining results from 9 seconds to 4 or 5.
But that figure is based on the premise that the program will be able to essentially read your mind correctly. So far it hasn’t worked for me. In fact, it’s had the opposite effect. For example, several minutes ago I tried to search for the keywords “small business”. Normally, I’d see the kind of content I’m looking for on the first try. This time, Google instant decided I was really looking for content related to the small business association. When I tried to delete the extra text, I must have accidentally clicked on the wrong thing because the search engine displayed results for this organization, not the topic in general. As a result, I had to search for the same thing again. That doesn’t save me any time and it’s very irritating.
Besides, I don’t really think 4 seconds is anything to get excited about in the first place. Supposedly Google modified its methods because it’s trying to stay ahead of its competitors, Yahoo and Bing. These companies saw slight gains in the last quarter, but I think Google may be overreacting a bit to this news. They are the top of their game, so I don’t understand why they would feel so threatened. Either way, I’ll be turning Google instant off in a minute. Has anyone else tried to use Google instant? If so, what did you think?