Today, Google unveiled their new search feature called Google Instant, which allows the search results to change in real-time, as you search. This innovative idea has sparked enthusiasm amongst US users as showcased in the video below:

Google announced that the purpose of Google Instant is to deliver users with faster, dynamic results and provide further predictive suggestion to guide users to find what they were really looking for.

Currently, Google Instant has started to roll out in certain countries with Google domains specific to the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia. There is however an additional restriction to users who would like to test this out – Google users will need to have the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8 in order for Google Instant Search to work.

Those Australian Google users who would like to get their hands on this feature can do so by signing into their Google account and installing Google Instant Search to their search results page. You can do this by going to the About Google Instant page and clicking on the “Try It Now” button.

I’ve been playing with the results this morning and it’s quite fascinating to see Google Instant results in action:

So if you have nothing searched in the SERPs, then you get a blank canvas. As you start searching away, the results and Google suggestion changes dynamically based on the words typed… for example:

From what can be seen at this stage, the results from both natural and paid search have not changed in terms of rankings, but it’s going to be quite interesting to uncover how Google Instant will impact the science of Search Engine Optimisation or Paid Search. Search Engine Land came out with an awesome article called Google Instant Search: The Complete User’s Guide, which talks about how Google Instant works and if they believe that Google Instant will impact rankings.

Matt Cutts also had his say on his thoughts of Google Instant Search, where he responds to the following question – “Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?:

“I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

Source: Matt Cutts Blog – Thoughts on Google Instant

Obviously, like anything that Google brings out there is initially a lot of hype and speculation, especially in the Search Marketing world; but only time will tell how Google Instant will truly impact the search engine results and how SEOers will have to change their ways of optimising websites.

Also another food for thought… does this mean that Google’s new product offering will further widen the gap between Google and the other search engines, such as Bing? Will “Instant Search” strength Google’s hold on users and on search advertisings?

Watch this space for more on Google Instant….

Update: If you’re trying to get Google Instant.. here’s a quick link you can use to get it working — http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy

Couldn’t resist snatching a look at what the two major parties are doing in the digital realm for this election. This election was supposed to be the big digital one taking cues from Obamas election in ‘08 but so far both parties are doing just ‘enough’ with the Libs marginally ahead. A classic example was the morning after the PM’s solo appearance on ABC’s Q&A show when Google searches for the Labor party and the PM were expected to spike. On this day however, the ruling party was conspicuous by its absence allowing its competitor to easily capture all those searches of Labor followers or potential fence-sitters.  Searches conducted on Tuesday for  ‘labor party’ and ‘julia gillard’ brought up paid ads instead by the Liberal Party attacking Labor failures. The Liberal party has obviously cleverly included in its list, Labor party brand terms and the names of Labors leaders ensuring users typing those terms see a Liberal Party paid ad instead. The ads also use the recently launched Sitelinks format which offers users multiple links to click on to enable voters to explore different facets of the Liberal Party’s campaign.

Paid search (PPC) can be effectively used in an election as messages can be updated and put live within hours in response to trending election themes or breaking news. PPC formats allow Election Campaign managers a low cost environment to test and run multiple messages which can serve as a far more credible means of testing concepts than traditional focus groups. Enhanced formats like Sitelinks allow Campaign Managers to integrate their offline and social media components into the Search strategy. Tailored messages can also be used focusing on the most relevant issues for different geographies eg states and cities in contrast to traditional advertising’s one message must fit all. With only a handful of major parties buying search terms in Australia, the costs of setting up running an effective search campaign would be far less expensive than buying primetime radio or television spots.

Google has set up its own page covering the Australian Federal Election which tracks election search trends on the major parties, leaders and issues along with links to a Google Map mashup to find polling booths and Electoral bases in your surburb.

Google announced today their trademark protection policy in many countries will be updated to be in line with the policy in place in the US and UK.  In this instance, Google will only investigate trademark protection if a company feels a competitor is being misleading.  So in practice competitors are able to bid on one another’s brand names, but can not include competitive brand names in their ads, or try to ‘trick’ consumers into clicking on their ad instead.

Advertisers have until the 14^th September 2010 to lodge their complaints under the existing policy, after which time the new policy will apply.

Australia, New Zealand and most Asian countries are not affected, although each country can have a unique policy.  Click here for a full list of affected countries.

We continue to urge all advertisers to ensure they have applied for proactive trademark protection in their relevant country.

Last month Google made the announcement that in addition to its regular search choice they would start offering a new “secure” alternative.  The new offering can be found at https://www.google.com and the idea behind the new service is rather simple. By using SSL technology you are able to create a secure and encrypted connection between your browser and Google, ensuring that no third parties on your network will be able to intercept your search results.

However, this new enhanced privacy potentially comes at a cost for those of us out there who rely on analytical software to gain valuable insights into how users come to discover our site. Let’s say for example you owned a website that sold home theatre systems, traditionally when a user searched for the phrase “buy home theatre” in Google they would be taken to the address http://www.google.com/search?q=buy+home+theatre. Then when a user clicked your listing in the search results and was taken to your website, using analytical software you could then see what page the user came from, and in turn, discover what search phrases they used to discover your site.

Conversely though, due to the way modern browsers handle the transition from a secure SSL connection to a regular webpage all information that would regularly be sent in the browsers referrers string is lost, leaving website owners seemingly with no way to determine what phrases are used to discover their site in Google. Some in the industry have been screaming that this is the death of analytics; however this is simply not the case.

It would be worthwhile noting that Google’s new SSL anonymous search alternative is in no way the default option and while it is too early to determine any meaningful data in terms of usage and adoption rates among regular web users, the general consensus so far seems to be that this is not going to be the next “big thing”.

Furthermore, something that seems to have been lost thus far in the panic is that for years now the millions of users running one of the many Internet security programs from vendors such as McAffe, Norton and Symantec tend to strip the referral string by default, albeit to zero fuss.

While it does seem at this stage rather unlikely that this new offering from Google will have any major effect for most website owners at this stage, for those who wish to err on the side of caution, a solution exists.

As previously mentioned the information contained within the browsers referrer string is only lost when the user’s browser makes the transition from a secure SSL connection to a regular unencrypted connection. Simply by offering users a secure connection when visiting your site you will be able to continue to capture the valuable analytical insights contained within the referrer string.

In the end it remains to be seen exactly what, if anything, this means for analytics. In the mean time, it’s nice to know that a solution exists.

In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.

Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.

But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.

This appears to have affected a large number of webmasters with reported traffic drops ranging from a 10% to 90% loss with a very apparent change on how Google is handling long-tail phrases and how far more spammy sites seem to be appearing in some results. This thread on Webmasterworld is long with a lot of analysis and speculation resulting in 13 pages of posts, so I’d suggest going straight to page 13.

This has had a much more noticeable affect and is apparently not finished yet. As Google isn’t too forthcoming Mayday could be a part of Caffeine; however, this shouldn’t necessarily be so because Google stated that Caffeine would be purely an infrastructure change that most users would probably not notice.

One poster, dusky, summarises on May 12th:

“There are too many legitimate white hat sites being whacked to believe it’s a penalty. Many well established gov and edu sites, large commercial and corporate sites, well known news and media sites that seen a change for the worst so far for the last three months at least and starting MayDay in particular. G* sites themselves are affected as noted above and somewhere else, how many more days or weeks this is going to take is probably everyone’s question, at least the people who join my “total re-index” camp anyway, or shall I call it total-recall. We used to think they lost some or most of the data when this happened, and that’s why the crawl rate and the re-indexing, but it turned out it was due to infrastructure and algo updates, Florida and BigDaddy are best examples.”

We have a theory based on TF-IDF. Ian Lavelle, my colleague here at Outrider, took the time to show us how this algorithm change (and apparent surge in spam pages showing in search results) could affect the long-tail. You can read Ian’s post here.

UPDATE

I thought I’d update this post based on the fact that SearchEngineLand has posted a confirmation of the Mayday algorithm change on May 27, 2010 (see excerpt below):

“Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks……

……However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.””

One week on after the launch of the new Google Search UI and reaction to the updated look and feel has been positive for the most part. Google has added a left panel to search result pages (SERP’s) to help searchers refine their search queries and find what they are looking for in a faster, easier way.

What’s New?

• There is a new panel on the left hand side to give quicker access to relevant search options and tools. The left panel is automatically open + fixed as opposed the show/hide options.
• The Google logo is bigger.
• The search field is 1.5 times longer.
• The search button now sits within the right end of the search field, whereas it used to be off to the right of the search field with a separating gap.
• Advanced search link is wrapped under the search button.
• No more horizontal blue bar between the search field and the results below it.
• Results data is now pulled up under the search field in a smaller text size.
• Results data now omits showing the results position. Showing us that by being on page 7 showed ‘Results 61 – 70′ was always helpful for manual ranking checks.

Google has a slew of products: Maps, Docs, Buzz, Chrome, Talk, Voice etc, but the Web Search product is the real bread and butter. So, its not surprising to find out that it has taken Google product managers and user experience designers months and months of testing, optimising and refining (at least as far back as Nov 2009) before the new Google Search UI got to the stage where it could be deployed.

Official Google Product Announcement

By looking at the social web, there’s not much buzz around the new Search UI, which should probably be interpreted as a positive outcome. People are continuing to search using Google either mildly affected or unaware of the minor changes. There’s a small group of bloggers who really don’t like it but as of yet there’s no group on Facebook decrying the update nor is there much buzz on Twitter.

It’s a bit of a departure for Google in some ways as it becomes a little bit more Bing-esque by having more links and search options automatically open on-page than ever before. Personally, I like it. I think the new UI looks good and helps me search and find the websites, news and images that I have been looking for.

Does the new Google UI change anything for SEO?

The updated Google Search UI update is purely aesthetic. It makes no difference to the ranking algorithm – so no changes there. However, the update does have an indirect effect on SEO because it changes the way in which searchers view the results. The organic search results are pushed into the middle of the page (arguably making them more prominent) sandwiched between the search options column and search ads column.

Also, since the search field is 1.5x wider I would expect this to influence search behaviour. Over time it will no doubt encourage people to do more long-tail searches. So instead of searching for “world cup 2010” we could expect a slight lift in the amount of people doing searches such as “world cup 2010 match schedule“.

Bonus Google UI Hack:

There’s no official option available to switch back to the ‘classic’ search results that we’ve all been using up til now. But if it bugs you, you can always go back to searching on the classic Google search interface by starting searches from: http://www.google.com.au/webhp?hl=all

What do you think of the new Google Search UI? Do you think that it looks more like Bing’s search interface? Leave your comments below.

It was announced earlier this week that Google launched their sales funnel tracking product.  This is a positive move in the right direction because there has been complete industry reliance on last click data to optimise search campaigns. Put simply, this new data will allow brands to monitor the entire consumer search journey from research to purchase. Moreover, it will also provide insights into the length of time from first to last click and thus further inform us on the entire sales cycle.

Outrider and GroupM Search proprietary research shows that “assist” keywords play a crucial role in the success of a campaign but failure to purchase these provides a competitor a distinct advantage by not being present on these keyword impressions. These insights together with the launch of Google search funnel will provide a new and interesting way to effectively invest our client’s budgets.

To date approaches such as portfolio bid management has leveraged last click wins – analysing the ROI of each keyword and not looking at the role these “assist” keywords play in a paid search campaign. Yes, your overall impression share might drop along with Paid search ROI at the expense of overall conversion search volumes. This might be acceptable to some clients if they are convinced that search operates in total isolation.

But more importantly, has the lost opportunity to optimise the entire media mix, including search, been discussed with clients? E.g. If we drive consumers to search from offline activity can we refine our overall media spend and ultimately achieve cost efficiencies across the entire media investment versus treating each media channel in isolation? Search is still more efficient than traditional media so why not take advantage of the consumer intent generated via search campaigns and minimise wastage of offline media?

As search continues to be the lynchpin of the overall media mix it will become increasingly importantly that budget is allocated to fund “assist” search terms otherwise competitors will leverage your offline media investment and happily intercept search traffic if you are not present.

The Google sales funnel fails to include SEO and thus is limiting. Outrider data shows that there is an interplay between SEO/SEM and consumers will click on either paid or organic search listings as long as the copy is relevant.

To that end, as technology vendors continue to invest in complete path analysis, integrating display and search, marketers will ultimately become the beneficiaries of more insights and only then will we see a dramatic shift of budgets from traditional media to digital.

Google recently took their social offering one step further when they released Google Buzz, which integrates right into Gmail. It is similar to Twitter, but has more features and is more robust. Google have had limited success with social; Orkut, their own social networking site, only gained traction in Brazil and India and numerous other social tools such as Jaiku, Dodgeball, FriendConnect, OpenSocial and Latitude, haven’t had the impact Google would have liked.

Google Buzz aggregates data from Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader, YouTube, Flickr and even your Google chat status. Facebook is currently missing from this list, but Google have announced that it’s not completely out of the question. Google Buzz automatically follows the contacts you email and chat to most frequently and photos, videos and links can be integrated into each Buzz message. There appears to be no limit to the number of characters within each message, so you no longer have to shorten your updates, or resort to textspeak, to fit within the 140 character limit.

Google Buzz connects with Picasa Web Albums and photos can be added directly to a Buzz message, either uploaded from your computer or selected from one of your existing Picasa albums. All photos added to a Buzz message are stored in your Picasa account and count toward your storage limit. As photos are shown inline with your Buzz message there’s no need to follow a link to a 3rd party site to view photos as is the case with Twitter. Adding public photos to your Picasa account will create a new Buzz message displaying the recently added photos that can then be viewed using the inbuilt full-screen viewer.

Posts and replies on Twitter are separate entries, which makes it hard to follow a conversation. Google Buzz has solved this by allowing comments directly onto the original post, overcoming the need for a separate reply. Google have also added a “like” button to each post, which is very similar to the Facebook feature added in February 2009.

The mobile version of Google Buzz allows you to tag your Buzz message with your current location. You are able to select actual places, like bars and restaurants, not just an address or a lat/long location. It is also possible to read Buzz from other people in and around the same location as yourself to discover what’s happening around you. Google also have plans to roll out a standalone version of Buzz outside of Gmail.

Already, there have been privacy concerns regarding Google Buzz. When your first enter Buzz, it automatically follows the people your most frequently email and chat to and by default this list and the list of people who follow you, are made public, so anyone can see who you most frequently email and chat to. In response to this, Google have made changes to the setup procedure so that instead of auto-following the people you most frequently contacted, you are presented with a list that you can review and confirm before continuing. Also, the option not to show who you follow and who follows you on your profile has been made more prominent, but these lists are still displayed by default.

The uptake of Google Buzz has been surprising to say the least. On February 11^th, 2 days after launching Buzz, Google announced that “tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out, creating over 9 million posts and comments. Plus, we’re seeing over 200 posts per minute from mobile phones around the world.” This is amazing considering that it was rolled out slowly.

Overall, Google Buzz is great product, it has taken the successful Twitter model, updated and expanded it and incorporated it right into Gmail and onto mobile. I don’t believe Google Buzz will pull current users away from Twitter or Facebook just yet. It may, however, entice new users who haven’t yet joined Facebook or Twitter, into micro-blogging as they do not have to sign up for a new account, join another service or get used to a new and unfamiliar interface as they can start “Buzzing” from their current Gmail account.

When Google announced its new “Real Time” Search results back in early December, there was a lot of talk around what this would mean to Google SERPs and how it will  impact organic search. In the usual Google fashion, the new enhancement created more speculation then answers.

What most people knew was that “real time” search results was an enhancement to Google Universal, where Google had teamed up with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca; and provided real time search results amongst it’s various other Universal search products. To get an idea of how this works, check out Search Engine Roundtable’s “Google Does Real Time Search: See It For Popeye” blog post; it clearly illustrates what Google’s SERPs look like with real time results.

Moving on from what we all know so far about Google Real Time Search, I wanted to discuss the next steps in Google’s evolution of real time search. What does Google count as current and relevant news; and how will the results be ranked naturally? I might actually have more questions than answers right now, but its food for thought?

Let’s look at what is considered “real time news”… Google states that “Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.”  So based on how Google explains the mechanism behind getting ‘real time’ news, the search results should be updated quite frequently on ‘hot topics’ that happen around the world.

For example,  playing around with searches around the Grammy Awards (which happened last week), Google SERPs bring up ’New Results’ at the top, ‘Latest Results for grammy awards’ (see) below) after the 3rd organic result, and ‘Video Results’ at the bottom of the page.

The “Latest results for grammy awards” section of the SERPs includes some interesting updates that reflect both positive and negative Twitter posts as well as latest press releases:

Considering the volume of posts on hot topics (such as the Grammy Awards), companies may have concerns their brand reputation could be tarnished by real time search in the blink of an eye. However, my perspective is that this only emphasizes the need for brands to embrace social media and engage with their consumers and their conversations, so that brand reputation can be managed more effectively. The main point of difference with Google’s Real Time Search results is that it centralises conversations from various social media platforms through one search platform.

Going back to the question about how Google manages to keep its real time search results relevant and only pick up on conversations that are worth displaying –one of Google’s guys, Amit Singhal, mentions that, similar to how Google adapted a page-ranking technology to retrieve relevant web pages in traditional web search, with tweets, the relevance of posts for real time search is built from the ‘reputed followers’. So put it in the words of Amit Singhal.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely.”
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com

Essentially, I gather that the tweets are valued on how reputable the Tweeple is, based on their followers and followings. It sounds like a popularity vote, but Google goes on to state that its much like how they value link popularity and its not about quantity but more the quality of the followers and followings. On top of all this, Google’s social ranking algorithm uses other filters to ensure its real time search results are as “spam-free” as possible.

In short, the introduction of real-time search to Google was inevitable based on how fast social media is growing; and the way the results are displayed in the “Latest news” section of the SERPs is a reflection of the reputation of the social media user. This ultimately means that brands and individuals need to pay more attention to their customers and the online conversation in conjunction with any other online marketing pursuits, to ensure they really do “Own the Digital Shelf”.

There is a lot of talk in the traps about website page speed. Google (via Matt Cutts and Webmaster Tools) has openly stated that page speed will be a factor into the ranking algorithm for 2010 and will likely roll out with Caffeine – faster the better and you’ll be rewarded for it.

Google Webmaster tools have been reporting sample data from sites that have page speed issues (you can find this in the Labs section under Site Performance). Within Google Webmaster it also suggests the supplied Page Speed Firefox plug-in (installs as part of Firebug) should be used to get more accurate and full data. This has been available since July 2009 so I guess we have had plenty of notice. This is already in play for AdWords where page speed will affect your quality score.

This tools reports in the order of priorities – which things are slowing the pages the most and also gives a suggested size savings if recommendations are carried out and, I mean, recommendations. It tells you specifically what files are problematic, which images should be attended to, which JavaScript files can be combined, which CSS definitions (within an include file) aren’t being used and can be excluded, DNS look-ups, browser caching and more.

Google introduced this idea of page speed officially in their blog in June 2009.

Not surprisingly it has been written up on many sites. Webpronews covered this in November 2009.

The goal here is to make the internet faster and improve the user experience. In turn, it is very likely that this will also improve traffic and conversions. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking.”

Of course there is going to be debate about this within the industry, with marketers and developers. It’s just a new little layer to make our jobs a little more challenging.

At this stage the Caffeine update has yet to roll out. The last update Matt Cutts posted can be found here: Expect Caffeine after the holidays.

Here are some other sites to read up on this:

Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools
Site Speed Google’s Next Ranking Factor
Google Wants the Web to Function like a Magazine
WebPerformance Best Practices
Should Web Page Speed Influence Google PageRank?