Last night Google announced that they will be going live with Google Suggest across all their datacenters: At a loss for words?
We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.
* Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in washington] – did you want [hotels in washington dc] or [hotels in washington state]? Don’t remember that song title or person’s name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing “From This Moment” as our wedding song).
So how does this drastically change the keywords we will see in referrer logs? Well obviously we will see less misspellings. You can probably forget about optimizing for those. It was already difficult considering Google often used “Did you mean:” results for most misspellings.
* Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.
* Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [san francisco chronicle] when you can just type in “san f…” and choose the suggestion right away?
I think the biggest change will be losing long tail keywords. Where you would usually see 4-5 keyword phrases, searchers may opt to try the short tail version Google Suggests. Even is the user stays with a long tail query it more than likely will be one from Google Suggests and not and original one from the end searcher. I remember Google saying at least 25% of all searches never occurred before. We can expect this number to come way down now from this change. So why is Google doing this? Maybe they are trying to push AdWords inventory more? Obviously the shorter the tail the more chance someone is bidding for the keywords.
Look at the keyword “new york….”
Google offers some popular other new york phrases like new york yankees, new york times, etc. Providing this to the end searcher drastically changes your searching habits/behaviors. You were looking for one thing and now Google can or has essentially offered you other suggestions to change your mind. Completely changes the query landscape.
If you happen to rank for one of those Google Suggested queries get ready for a LOT more traffic.
High Rankings discussion continues here:
End Of Optimising For Spelling Errors, Google Suggest goes live
What do you think?
