We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.

* Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in washington] – did you want [hotels in washington dc] or [hotels in washington state]? Don’t remember that song title or person’s name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing “From This Moment” as our wedding song).

So how does this drastically change the keywords we will see in referrer logs? Well obviously we will see less misspellings. You can probably forget about optimizing for those. It was already difficult considering Google often used “Did you mean:” results for most misspellings.

* Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.

* Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [san francisco chronicle] when you can just type in “san f…” and choose the suggestion right away?

I think the biggest change will be losing long tail keywords. Where you would usually see 4-5 keyword phrases, searchers may opt to try the short tail version Google Suggests. Even is the user stays with a long tail query it more than likely will be one from Google Suggests and not and original one from the end searcher. I remember Google saying at least 25% of all searches never occurred before. We can expect this number to come way down now from this change. So why is Google doing this? Maybe they are trying to push AdWords inventory more? Obviously the shorter the tail the more chance someone is bidding for the keywords.

Look at the keyword “new york….”

Google offers some popular other new york phrases like new york yankees, new york times, etc. Providing this to the end searcher drastically changes your searching habits/behaviors. You were looking for one thing and now Google can or has essentially offered you other suggestions to change your mind. Completely changes the query landscape.

If you happen to rank for one of those Google Suggested queries get ready for a LOT more traffic.

High Rankings discussion continues here:

End Of Optimising For Spelling Errors, Google Suggest goes live

What do you think?

Comments

Criticism met Google’s proposed changes to the program. Publishers located in countries disallowed from netting AdSense referrals complained about being penalized despite having referrals come from visitors located in North America, Japan, or Latin America.

Google disclosed an adjustment to the proposed plan in response to the feedback they received. Said the AdSense blog:

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You’ll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.

Google will also change a couple of other referrals. Google Pack referrals that used to generate up to $2 will only return up to $1 starting the third week of February. During the same week, Google plans to reduce referrals for Firefox when those referrals come from China.

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