Unless you’re a Yahoo! or Bing apologist, chances are you’ve noticed the arrival of Google Instant sometime in the last week. Google Instant is the new service from Google that aims to save you 2-5 seconds of search time by offering you search recommendations as you type. Just go to google.com and try typing in something in the search box and see what happens. If you’re feeling lazy and can’t be bothered, then just watch the video to the right. Brilliant?
Well, some don’t think so, and those are specifically search marketers who sense some trouble on the horizon. Search marketers specialize in what is called SEO (search engine optimization), and what they do is focus on streamlining keyword content on websites for the purpose of helping those sites achieve top rank in search results. There’s much more to SEO than just simple keywording, but keywords are a large component of it, and in the case of Google Instant, keywords are the crux of the issue.
So what’s the problem? Back in the late 90′s when Google landed and search engine competition came to the fore, search marketing took off and e-marketers began paying close attention to how search engines structured their algorithms and dealt search results. Through close analysis and experimentation, e-marketers developed models of how these algorithms operated, and when these models were placed into action the chances of attaining desired search rankings increased. All of this assumed, of course, that marketers had a good understanding of their target markets and that they knew the kinds of keywords that people within that market would enter into search queries. This worked wonderfully for insightful, sharp marketers – not so well for poor marketers, obviously.
What Google Instant does is take away some of the power of insightful marketers to guess at what kinds of keyword combinations people within their target markets will end up querying. Because most search marketing is undertaken with strong focus on keyword combinations (i.e. Century + College + Marketing + Rocks), efforts are rendered less effective by Google’s stepping in and influencing what keywords people actually end up searching. Theoretically, a search marketer could have spent years streamlining a website and its pages to rank highly within Google’s results, only now to watch its search traffic crumble in the face of Google’s power of suggestion. Ouch!
There are a lot of question marks here. For instance, will Google Instant be successful with Google users, or will it die a quick death? Will Google Instant encourage search marketers to shift focus over to Bing and Yahoo! as their market share grows? Is saving a person 2-5 seconds out of their day really meaningful? (Alright, admittedly, that last question mark is all me.) 
What are your thoughts?
