Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

SEARCH ENGINE SUGGESTIONS AND PROMPTS

As noted earlier in the section on query refinements, search engines incorporate many methods for integrating browser navigation into the search experience to enable searchers to drill into what they’re really searching for. These search prompts are typically based on past searcher behavior.

In 2010, Google launched Google Instant,5 which not only predicts what searchers likely want as they type but shows the results of the predicted query before a searcher finishes typing it! Google says this saves time for the searcher, not only because the prediction is often correct, but also because when searchers see the predicted results, they can more quickly realize what types of refinements are necessary. Google described it this way:

Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive, and powerful.

Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!

You can see this in Figure 5.3. The searcher has only typed “a,” but Google has filled in the rest of the word (“amazon”) in gray and has displayed corresponding search results. As the searcher types additional letters, ...