Will Google Instant change how you type?
Today, Google released their Google Instant system. We’ve seen a precursor to it when doing searches in Firefox or Safari where suggested search terms would drop down below the search field. This takes things a step further by giving you live search results while you type in google.com’s search field. It’s great, except for people like me that type fast. In order for Google Instant to work well, you need to type slowly. In fact, if your internet connection is quite slow, the latency is so bad that you may not get live results fast enough.
Typing vs. light speed
I’m the type of person that types fast. When I know what it is I’m looking for, it’s easier for me to just finish the search term than to stop, look at the suggestions, move the mouse to the one I want, and click. Even using the arrow keys can be slower. What I find is Google Instant is a waste of time for me because I would have to type slower in order for Instant to kick in. I find that the tradeoff is better when I finish my search and read the results at the end of what I want.
In searching for something I know I’m listed high in, “Warcraft podcast”, I decided to type slowly in order to see how close to the end I needed to go before Google gave me what I wanted. “Warcraft”, of course, brought up the World Of Warcraft site, and several other Blizzard sites underneath it. Moving to “warcraft p”, it brought up a list of Warcraft pet sites. This is completely understandable since Warcraft pets are a constant question on our site. Moving on to “warcraft po”, I got a bunch of search results for opening router ports for Warcraft. This was a little surprising for me since Warcraft doesn’t generally need to have ports open to run. It wasn’t until I typed “warcraft pod” that the podcast list came up. So really, what did I gain from that? Essentially nothing. I cleared the search text field and typed “warcraft podcast” as fast as I normally do. I typed the whole phrase faster than Google could keep up.
As a developer, if I need to find an article based on some problem, I generally do a quick search first, such as:
“windows system error code 5″
This is just an example of a quick search since I just want to know what an error 5 is (for those of you that care, it’s an access denied error). However, there are times when I need to be more specific, such as:
“error 5 removing driver windows 7 64″
This way, I hit what I think to be all the key words that an article may have which may lead me to why I’m getting an error 5 while removing a driver on a Windows 7 machine running 64-bit. That may be too broad, or not good enough, so I may have to narrow my search to:
“windows 7 64 ‘error 5′ removing ‘port monitor’”
A search like that generally gets me exactly what I want. Typing slower won’t get me the proper specific result any faster.
Will this change SEO?
Some people are claiming that this is going to change SEO. I’m not completely convinced of that. If people typed like they did in the 80′s by hunting and pecking, than maybe people would have a case for SEO changes because the typing speed would be much slower than Google’s live search results. However, today people are better at typing at a younger age, so I would suspect that if I’m doing a search for “warcraft podcasts”, I don’t think I have to compete with Warcraft pets and router ports before people get to me.
Old habits die hard
Google Instant won’t change the way I type. I’ve been searching on the web so long that I know what to find pretty damn fast. A good vocabulary helps in searches because you know what phrases people use, such as using “latency” instead of “slow”. I won’t be typing any slower because of Google Instant. I think it has its merits and it’s very impressive technology, but I’m not sure how it affects fast typers like myself.
Category: Technology
