Google rolled out Instant yesterday, a service that suggests search phrases as you type and the search results mysteriously appear and change as search terms gets longer. And all this without you having to hit the grey SEARCH button!

“Technological feat” echoed one analyst, “Game changer” said another, “Cannot be mimicked by competition” came from another corner (if you were following search engines closely it was the other way round for the last several months).

Google claims that “the typical; searcher takes 9 seconds to type in a search query and we saw many example of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type” (emphasis is mine). Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search as the claim goes on.

A research report last year concluded that usually two searches burn enough energy to make a cup of coffee. Is the Instant search greener or otherwise? But that is a topic for another day.

How will Instant impact the search engine businesses specially those that rely on Search Engine Marketing of pay-per-click advertizing and those that depend on their ranking in organic search results?

Since search results appear while you are typing in your query, it is possible that the paid ads will change as the query length changes (understandable). However what you see is that the ads change even with suggestions that appear mystically (in the words of Marissa Mayer not mine) before a user has completed typing in the query!

An example below illustrates this point. I started with the keyword “send money to india”

Google Instant: Search Query suggestions

Next I hit the space bar in preparation of completing my query. The mystic element comes into play:

Google Instant: Search Query Suggestions

Notice the suggestion (in light grey) just next to the query. I have not hit the search button signaling Google to fetch the results.

If you see closely you will notice how the ads from paid search have changed in the two scenarios just by hitting the space bar invoking the mystical element.

Just to complete this point see the example (below) when only the first two search terms were entered (still no jabbing of the SEARCH button)

Google Instant: The first 2 search terms

The presence and order of appearance of both paid and organic listings change as the search query is typed in or just space bar is hit.

End of the Long Tail?

SEM advertisers who rely on the long tail may be in for a surprise, as they may see fewer visitors clicking through while their Click Thru Rate may not have dropped significantly.

Reason – it is not unlikely that a searcher will stop on seeing the results after typing in first 1 or 2 terms (or by hitting the space bar). Consequently it is likely that 1or 2 words long keywords (typically known as Head) will become more expensive to buy simply because results from these will appear first no matter whether the searcher has signaled her intention to begin search (by hitting the search button). The Tail will disappear unless the searcher has waded through the unintended results pulled up by the search engine!

Is this a subtle way of passing control from searcher to the search engine?

Do people type in more than 1 or 2 keywords? Google has claimed that over 54% of all search queries they see are more than 3 words! Hitwise places this at 35%. Clearly in the Google’s claim it must be these  longer search terms that take between 30 -90 seconds.

How does this play with another stat from Google that 1 out of 5 queries each day have not been seen in the last 90 days if at all! Will be interesting to see how Instant will handle those.

Finally the size does matter….in Google’s case shorter the better!

The year 2010 started with an earth shattering earthquake in Haiti forcing 1.5 million to find a shelter. Then a devastating earthquake hit Chile in the small hours of morning on Feb 27, displacing 2 million.

Exceptionally heavy rainfall caused massive floods and landslide displacing 250,000 people in China.

Then came once-in-500 years flood in Pakistan affecting 20% of the country’s population and displacing over 4 million (the number is still rising!)

Moscow battled a fire that forced it to declare emergency!

UN has warned that it is battling donor fatigue in mobilizing funds for relief operations in the flood beleaguered country.

Is world getting desensitized  due to the high frequency of high impact disasters?

Search trends on these 4 disasters this year on Google Search Insights throw some interesting results:

Worldwide Search Index for the 4 search phrases on Google

Note the intensity of search interest! The timelines show striking spike of interest in the first two disasters of the year, but no sudden spurt of interest for the rest of the three….

Do earthquakes grab our attention more?

Floods in China and fire near Moscow do not even show up relative to the first two!

Is anyone even interested in the 3 relatively “unsearched” disasters?

Google’s answer is again interesting:

Floods in Pakistan: 4m displaced

Predictable! Expect more given the scale of disaster?

Which City is more concerned with floods and massive mudslides in China?

Who is concerned?

Checking interest for earthquake in Chile and Moscow fire just for comparison:

Who has shown more concerned?

It may not have escaped your attention that Australians have searched more on these natural disasters than any other city followed by London (UK). Interestingly the people from the Down Under did not show that level of concern for the earthquake in Haiti!

Maybe this low level of concern worldwide (do you think search trends reflect the issues at the top of people’s mind?) is reflected in muted response to fund mobilization for flood relief!

If you remember the media coverage, both traditional and on internet, was far more intense for the first two!

Riding the Marketing Highway

If you searched on the keyword “oil spill” (937M+ results) on Google you will discover that BP is bidding on the keyword to hit the top spot. Their ad tells the curious that the link will provide information on the spill and BP’s effort in helping.  BP did not stop at this one keyword but extended it  right into the realm of the long tail with keyword like “deepwater horizon explosion causes” (down to 2M+ search results). The company extended its paid search to News (ok), Books (?), Shopping (??), Discussions (not bad) and if you are in map section searching for “deepwater horizon oil spill” you will find the BP ad pointing you in the right (?) direction!

BP bidding on the keyword oil spill

Why is EzLocalJobFind.com paying for the keyword - oil spill on Yahoo??

BTW the keyword “oil spill lawsuits” brought up 16M hits  on Google with Beasley Allen as the sole advertiser (they claim on their website -www.oil-spill.com to have filed a class action lawsuit on the oil spill).
Continue reading »

Concerns about online privacy and limits to data sharing have dominated the social media waves over last few weeks. First Zuckerman blazed away with Open Graph, relegating any concerns  about privacy to something very old fashioned. He then made a quick U turn and promised to simplify privacy settings on Facebook  (whose security settings are not less daunting than setting the winking clock on a old VCR -if you are old enough to remember).

Then the shoe dropped loudly with a research report from PEW  Internet revealing than 71% of youngsters (ages 18-29) have changed the privacy settings to limit sharing information about themselves. 47% of this age group removed unwanted comments from others from their sites and 41%  turned to anonymity by removing their names from photos/tagged photos.

Quite the opposite to being social!

This undercurrent has been simmering for some time. Previous surveys conducted by CareerBuilder and Microsoft have established that young job seekers were being rejected because of content on their Facebook pages or online photo albums. In fact college grads have been creating profiles with incomplete names or fake alias just to escape the unwarranted  attention from Recruitment Managers or overzealous Admission Officers. (See the blog post on Hiring in a social world…)
Continue reading »

Last January Microsoft commissioned a survey  involving 2500 Recruiting Professionals, HR and consumers.  The results were startling for job seekers in the US.  Three out of four said that reviewing online information has become a part of the formal hiring process. 79% said that they research on candidates online, Googling or trolling Facebook or YouTube and picture sharing sites. A whooping 70% admitted that they have rejected candidates based on what they saw in the online profiles!!!

Law Governing Equal Opportunity

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Title VII goes further to prohibits discrimination against an individual because of his or her association with another individual of a particular race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Is the act of rejecting an applicant based on his/her social media profile an act of denying opportunity without any sufficient cause? Is EEOC aware of this widespread practice?

Continue reading »

Last week at  Search Engine Strategies show in New York City, Yusuf Mehdi,  the Search Boss at Bing, admitted that Microsoft neglected the long tail of search “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail,“. He went on to say “… it turned out the long tail was much more important.” This, of course,  caused a ripple in the media and everyone weighed in with their own angle on this revelation.

For those of us, neck deep in the thicket of search engine marketing this did not come as a surprise.  For the word on the street has always been that Google’s had (and still has) the biggest lead on indexing of the long tail keywords. Their gargantuan index has helped Google’s ranking algorithm to match the queries exactly to the desired content, much faster. It also helped small advertisers by providing them an an affordable way of  generating leads through paid search in the face of stiff competition.

Continue reading »

The two and half hour social media boot camp at Four Seasons, Palo Alto, drew participants from both large and small companies in the Bay Area. The group had strong representation from Business-to-Business and Direct to Consumer companies.

Not surprisingly majority of the participants were already experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin YouTube and blogs. They talked about issues ranging from privacy yet effective communication to measuring ROI, to challenges in content generation & distribution and wondered if the channel was right for them.

Continue reading »

Internet in US virtually lit up when some doctored images appeared image appeared at the top of the image search results for Michelle Obama (a sample appears below)

Image search results?

Why the related search suggestion?

Continue reading »

It was all Treats…No Tricks

13 is not necessarily an unlucky number. On October 27, Forrester announced the winners of Groundswell Awards for 2009. For the first time this year, the Awards included a Business-to-Business category. Regalix was one of the lucky thirteen in B2C, B2B and Employee & Non Profit categories.

It was a matter of great pride for us at Regalix to bag this prestigious Award in B2B Spreading category for MetricStream’s community- Compliance Online.

Continue reading »

According to statistics published by Facebook, the social networking site has 300 Million active users and an average user has 130 friends.

Last year Newsweek carried an article (by Steven Levy ) that the average number of friends in Myspace was 180 (May 2008).

Continue reading »