By now I’m sure everyone’s all seen and had a play around with the new Google Instant search interface. There’s lots of early reaction to this on the web, my own included on Econsultancy yesterday.
Obviously the main goal behind this is to provide results much more quickly and look to improve a searchers overall user experience. But has anyone else noticed that the “I feel lucky”, while still listed on the homepage, is actually now redundant?
Image credit: Flickr
In my opinion, the majority of Google’s changes and updates look to achieve one of two things:
improve the relevancy of results for searchers, andmake more moneyIdeally both!
However, Google Instant is about increasing speed and reducing the user journey required for searchers. But interestingly it looks like it will make them more money too.
By providing results as soon as you start typing, the new search function now bypasses the “I feel lucky” button, which has cost Google an incredible estimated $110 million dollars in potential revenue in the past! Any good conversion optimisation specialist (or accountant) would tell you to remove that button – which is effectively what Google have done. The only way you can click the “I feel lucky” button now is for an empty query string on the Google homepage, and this just takes you to the Google logos page.
So that’s clearly a great way of generating extra revenue and that’s all before taking into account the extra paid search ads being served for each query and the potential extra interstitial clicks generated while mid-query.
Also, for Google – the main reason they are such a huge money-making machine is their huge market share? As I mentioned in my Econsultancy comments, if Instant has a negative reaction this could be a good time for users to switch (most likely to Bing). So how this affects the user has to be the main objective first and foremost. Increasing the average value per searcher is also a goal they will be keen on improving further, and rightly so, but it does little to their revenue if the market share drops as a result.
So what do you think, is a major increase in revenue a key and intentional part of Google’s thinking in the launch of Instant?
Posted in google, seo |
July has been another busy month at SEOptimise – and seeing that we are currently writing around the web, I thought it would be a good time to share these posts with SEOptimise readers and recap on the top posts we’ve written here on the blog.
Collect all contacts into GMail or FlowTown - This helps you to organise all of your contacts into a single location. Personally I find FlowTown to be very useful – especially for analysing demographics – but GMail does the job here too and is free (FlowTown charges per import).
Group contacts - Filter those who you’d like to connect with on all sites and if you want to be more selective over who you connect with, then it’s useful to separate professional contacts with friends and family.
Import connections – most social networking sites have the option to import contacts via CSV or GMail – so once you’ve collected and organised all of your contacts into a central location you can look to import these into each of the social media website’s you use.