September 3, 2010 (CAP News Wire) – Google has acknowledged testing a new kind of search function in its signature search engine page: A “streaming” search that “changes with each letter you type into its search query bar,” according to CNET.
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” CEO Eric Schmidt told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview, explaining this and other recent recent initiatives.
“They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next,” he added, rather cryptically.
Is that true, or is Google just desperately scrambling to come up with new ways to overhaul its signature service in the face of plunging fortunes (its stock price is down about $150 in 2010)? That’s impossible to tell at the moment, so the more appropriate question is: If Google implements this new streaming type of search, what’s it mean for the Internet, and for affiliate marketers?
“Basically, Google is taking its ‘Suggest’ tool a step further,” writes Cade Metz at the Register. “Rather than just suggesting possible searches as you type, it’s suggesting entire results pages. This is yet another way that Google is trying to give you information before you ask for it.”
This could upend all existing SEO platforms, as users searching for one term end up clicking on results that appear before they’ve even finished typing. And it could trigger a race for online marketers to engineer content for new, previously anticipated keywords. That is, if it’s implemented on a large scale, which may be unlikely, given that “at any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments,” according to Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker, per TechCrunch.
In related news, the Microsoft-Yahoo merger is finally becoming a search engine reality, as WebProNews.com points out. According to one expert there, even as Microsoft and Yahoo become essentially the same company, their search engines “will still produce different search results”.
And finally, here’s an interesting article exploring the idea that Google’s new biggest competitor could be none other than Amazon.com.