By now I’m sure you’re aware of the new updates Google has made to the way it displays search results. If not our own Doug Platts has written a post breaking it down. But what will it mean with respects to user behaviour and ultimately the click through’s to your site.
To begin with there will undoubtedly be quite a high novelty factor with the new way results are displayed and it will take people a bit of time to get used to the new way it works, but after people get used to the new interface I believe search behaviour will change in the following way.
1) More search will happen in the long tail and less in the head
As users can now see the search results (SERPs) change as they type, over time they will be more likely to continue refining their searches until they see the results that they are looking for. In the past if you were looking for car insurance you might have searched on that term, looked at the results, reaslised that in fact you were looking for ‘car insurance in Ireland’, done another search, looked at the results, decided to refine further to ‘car insurance in Ireland for women’ looked again at the results and then make one final refinement to ‘car insurance in Ireland for women over 50’. Due to the instant nature of the new SERPs it is likely that more people will continue to refine their search until they see exactly what they are looking for. Therefore the proportion of head (short searches) traffic will decrease and long tail (longer searches) will increase. This will obviously benefit sites that are well optimised for longer tail search queries and hurt sites that only focus on the head.
2) Being above the fold will become even more important
Because users are now refining their searches on the fly and continuing to refine until they see what they want, having your site appear above the fold in the SERPs will be more important than ever. As people refine their search the results will change but they will only be able to see the ones above the fold (on screen) not the ones below the fold. So even though your site may be exactly the site they are looking for, if you rank 8th they will not see you and there is a good chance that they will further refine their search until a site appears above the fold that matches their query.
3) Google Suggest will play a greater importance
Now that the displayed SERPs are based on Google suggestions (at least initially before the user has finished typing their whole query) being able to get your brand or at least the terms you are interested in into those suggestions is going to become increasingly important. If I type in ‘Money Saving’ it currently displays suggestions such as ‘mom’, ‘tips’, ‘ideas’. However if the term ‘expert’ was displayed as a suggestion the site MoneySavingExpert.com would see a large increase in traffic from Google (we have seen this effect with some of our clients). This also ties into personalised and local results where Google uses the users search history and location to alter the results that are displayed (as talked about by Doug Platts here)
What will be interesting to see is if this becomes the future of search. If people show great enthusiasm for searching this way it will force other search engines to follow suit or get left behind. Will Bing become instant too, or will users find this new way of searching too distracting and leave Google for the competition? Will Google Image search become instant in the future, what about Youtube, or indeed any search related activity, exciting times ahead for search.
Matt on 
September 9th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I can see another thing happening though that will lead to more refined “paid results”
say im advertising in an magazine and my companys name is “car maniac”
now a person sees that advert, and thinks ill go check that persons prices
so they start typing and they do “car man”
at this point there will be quite a lot of results, and most likelly (if SEO is good) the top result will be something like “the car man slashes prices”, so the person thinks, that must be the site im looking for
and goes to that site, decides thats a good price and buys something, now whats happened is “car maniac” has basiclly paid for advertising for “car man”, and I can see a (large {really what can they do}) backlash from advertisers on this
//side point
these live results also will have a driving factor for modem users, modem users will move to bing/yahoo or basiclly anyone that allows the “search” button to be used to get results,
if your on a page on a modem and you start typing and constantlly content is trying to get loaded (whilst atm that content is quite simple) it uses bandwidth, so for modem users i can see this driving people to a “simpler” search engine
September 9th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Hi Keloran,
I suspect some people will turn off Google Instant if its too much of a resource hog on their low bandwidth network, but you’re right some might simply switch search engines. I can’t imagine too many people in the US and Europe still using modems though.
Regarding paid search it will be interesting to see how this plays out. As you say people may start bidding on “Car” in the hope of catching people searching for “car insurance”
Another point will be to see how well Google can police/stop inappropriate content appearing as you type innocent phrases. We’ve already come accross a few SERPs you probably wouldn’t want to see as you browse the web in the office
September 13th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
What concerns me, and no one has pick up on it yet, is what results will be shown to children who use the search function? Both my two girls aged 10 & 6 use google almost daily to find games, music vids etc, if they inadvertently type in a term that could be mis construed by predictive search, what will they be shown and how can parental controls be applied?
September 13th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
oops, didn’t see the last comment of the previous poster, my bad