A Quick Look at Google Instant: Just keep typing!

Following up on Mark Giangrande's Short Takes On The News (Aug. 23, 2010), Google Instant is the recently launched search feature that displays search results as you type. It is available (read default) for web searches and some specialized searches like Google Books. See image right for the display after starting a search for The Bramble Bush by typing 'bram" -- in other words, keep typing! Google Instant apparently is not available for GLOJ, at least not yet.

According to the Google Official Blog post, Search: now faster than the speed of type, benefits include

Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
 
Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.

Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

See also the following Google post, Fly through your Instant search results with keyboard nav.

In SEO Experts Examine Early Findings on Google Instant, Josh Braaten reports

Think about Google Instant as you plan out the content of your site. Longer keyword phrases typically convert much better and can often come with less competition than shorter keyword phrases. And now it seems as though Google is introducing changes to promote longer searches.

Keyword phrase length was one important topic, but the real speculation centered on the effects of the new user interface of Google Instant. As we type, more paid search results and the top several organic rankings for head terms have a greater chance of peeling off search users from long-tail terms as they dynamically generate as users type.

Steve Matthews identifies some of the issues that merit attention with Google's recent implementation of this default setting search query feature in his LLRX post, Google Instant and Legal Search. [JH]