Google Instant: Impact on Search queries

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Webmasters, you may notice some changes in you
Search queries
data due to the launch of
Google Instant.
With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what
the user has typed, so this means people could be seeing and visiting your website much faster
than before, and often without clicking the search button or hitting “enter.”

While the presentation of the search results may change, our most important advice to webmasters
remains the same: Users want to visit pages with compelling content and a great user experience.

With Google Instant, you may notice an increase in
impressions
because your site will appear in search results as users type.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant:

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (for example,
   by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.
2. New: The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as
   a search result, ad, or a related search.
3. New:The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

To give an example, let’s say your site has lots of impressions for “hotels” and “hotels in santa
cruz”. Now, because Instant is quickly fetching results as the user types, the user could see your
site in the search results for “hotels” after typing only the partial query “hote”. If a user
types the partial query “hote” and then clicks on any result on the page for “hotels”, that counts
as an impression for your site. That impression will appear in Webmaster Tools for the query
“hotels”. The term ‘hotels’ would also be included in the HTTP referrer when the user clicks
through to visit your website.

It’s likely that your site will still see impressions for queries like
“hotels in santa cruz”, but because Instant is helping the user find results faster, your site may
see an increase in impressions for shorter terms as well.

Let us know if we can help you better understand how these changes impact
Webmaster Tools,
measured
Search queries and impressions, CTR,
or anything else. We’d love to hear from you in our blog comments or
Webmaster Help Forum.

Guest post by Doantam Phan, Instant Search Team