Google Instant: Understanding its Impact on Your Business

Sep. 14, 2010

Last week Google introduced their newest search update, Google Instant and since then there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about what effects this will have on web marketing.

While instant search isn’t a new concept, because of Google’s enormous popularity and usage this change is getting a lot of attention. Essentially what Google Instant does, is it reduces the amount of time it takes you to search for your queries, by providing you with search results as you type.

According to Google, “[Their] key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.”

This “technical insight” led them to believe that by providing search results as the user types it in, rather than waiting for them to finish their query, means that the user will be able to use Google’s predictions to reach what they’re looking for faster.

The real benefit of this over some other search engines is that if you’re logged into your Google account, then the results are personalized and you will be receiving faster, individualized search results.

Some further facts from Google state that:

The typical searcher (on Google) took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and many times searches took up to 30-90 seconds to type. Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
If everyone uses Google Instant globally, Google estimates this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.