Google this week released its Instant Search feature, which displays live search results as soon as you begin typing.  By providing results before a query is complete and removing the need to hit the “enter” key, Google claims users will save two to five seconds per search.

Are we too impatient to wait a matter of seconds for our search results? What’s feeding our new-found need for speed? And why does Google feel the need to answer our questions before we’ve even asked them?

Faster connections

The flow of information around the Web has accelerated rapidly over recent years. The most obvious cause is that our Web connections have become significantly faster over time.

This isn’t merely a result of greater broadband penetration, but also the near-ubiquity of 3G networks. Not only have we become accustomed to fast connections in our homes, but we’ve become conditioned to a similar experience on the go.

The real-time Web

To Web users, however, this trend has been most evident in the “real-time Web” movement. Services like Twitter and Facebook now deliver messages from our friends in seconds.

And while most breaking news stories were previously sourced from mainstream media outlets — taking hours to propagate via blog posts and emailed links — significant news events can now spread through Twitter in a matter of minutes.

Often, stories also enter the news cycle via on-the-ground reports posted to social networks. This significantly accelerates the news-gathering process and the speed at which important information reaches consumers.

In short, these quick status updates between friends have conditioned us to expect immediate access to information — whether that’s breaking news or simply knowing what our friends are up to. Why should we expect anything less from search engines?

Enabling discovery

Social networking services have fostered another change in consumer behavior; one that puts Google at a real disadvantage. As a greater volume of timely, relevant information is delivered to us via status updates from friends, we spend less time searching.

What’s more, many social sites now use our social connections to recommend content to us without the need to seek it out.

This so-called “discovery” trend, of which iTunes Ping is the most recent example, threatens to usurp the search box. If relevant information is delivered to us without extra effort, why type words into a box?

Google Instant Search is tackling the discovery problem, too: With every letter you type, Google serves up suggestions of what you may be looking for. Search for “tech company,” and Google provides suggestions for “tech company news,” “tech company valuation,” and “tech company names.”

What’s more, this feature enables truly personalized discovery by taking into account your search history, location and other factors — Google is essentially emulating social networks by trying to predict what we’re looking for without the need to submit a fully-formed search.

Next up: Google Predictive Search?

Google is unlikely to rest on its laurels now that Instant Search has been released. The only way the company can truly compete with social discovery is by going one step further.

What if instead of guessing your intent while you search, Google could predict your needs before you search? That’s likely the next evolution of Google search, according to statements from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“The next step of search is doing this automatically. When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly: ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ‘Did you know … ?’ ” Schmidt said at the IFA consumer electronics event in Berlin, Germany, this week.

“This notion of autonomous search — to tell me things I didn’t know but am probably interested in — is the next great stage, in my view, of search.”

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Like Google and Bing, Yahoo! has integrated Twitter into their search results. But that wasn’t good enough for Bartz and the gang. No, they wouldn’t be satisfied until people could conduct some serious Tweeting from Yahoo! itself. And so a deal has been struck.

If you so choose, you will be able to access your Twitter feed from Yahoo! including Mail and the Sports portal. You’ll also be able to Tweet to your heart’s content, directly from Yahoo!

Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, consumer products group, Yahoo! decided the best way to give official comment on the matter would be through the delivery of a 140 character statement:

We’re turning the key to the online social universe — you will find the most personally relevant experiences through Yahoo!

Lest you think this is solely a boon for Yahoo!, remember that while Twitter is growing fast, they’ll still benefit from a boost of exposure to the millions of Yahooligans worldwide.

“The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo! integration,” said Twitter cofounder, Biz Stone. “Tweets in more places brings relevance where and when you need it most.”

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The search marketing team of Yahoo! says that firms need to upgrade their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to make sure they get better return investments.

In the search engine’s blog, marketers were advised to do proper keyword selections, saying that this area is important especially when a company starts using professional SEO services.

Depending on the goal of an SEO campaign, sites will need to focus on high-volume search terms or product-specific phrases.

It is also important for an SEO campaign to respond to consumer behavior.

The Yahoo! marketing team explained: “Users are more sophisticated in their searches now, and we’ve seen that up to 20 per cent of searches in any given month can be search queries never seen before by a search engine.”

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If you have an AdWords campaign set up to reach searchers using Google’s mobile search, you’ve got a new feature to enhance your efforts. Google is enabling click-to-call phone numbers in the ads that appear on mobile web browsers.

Google Jan. 28 took its AdWords click-to-call ad program out of beta, offering advertisers a potentially lucrative new way to connect with their target audiences through high-end smartphones with HTML Web browsers.

Click-to-call ads let advertisers add local business numbers alongside their destination URLs in mobile search ads. When users of smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Nexus One, search for a local business from their mobile phone and stumble upon ads that have these numbers, smartphone users can click on the ads’ phone numbers and a call is automatically generated. If a smartphone user is searching for a local pizza place on their mobile device, then they can now simply click on the ads phone number and order up their favorite pie.

Since Google’s mobile click-to-call ads are generated based on location, if your company is a chain, an ad will be served up with the closest location to a user – and will contain the appropriate phone number. This Adword feature is important because it allows users to find out the most approriate phone number when the company has multiple shops.

How to utilize this Adwords feature?  To add click-to-call in mobile AdWords ads, simply set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Then make sure your campaign is set up to appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers.

Google explained its rationale for offering such ads, and how searches made on mobile devices differ from those on computers, in a blog post:

“When people search for goods or services using their mobile phones, they often prefer to call a store rather than visit that store’s Website. Whether they’re placing a direct order, making a reservation or inquiring about services, the ability for prospective customers to easily call your business is a key distinguishing feature of searches made on mobile phones versus computers.”

BroadPoint AmTech analyst Benjamin Schachter said in a research note advertisers pay the same cost-per-click for a call as they would for a “click-through” to the destination URL.

Schachter added that a meaningful percentage of mobile queries are for phone numbers or local information, making a phone number associated with an ad a highly relevant component on a search engine results page.

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Unethical tactics employed by companies utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics such as link farms and loading Web pages filled with irrelevant keywords, are not welcomed by search engine operators. This declaration was issued by two market players.

Asked if organizations such as content farms are outsmarting its system by flooding the Web with low-quality content to earn high-click rates, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company “prefers quality over quantity” to manage its Bing search engine.

“Backlinks, also known as ‘inbound links’, should be relevant to the page being linked to, or relevant to an SEO’s domain if they are being linked to the homepage,” he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. He pointed out that backlinks from sites considered to be authoritative in their field are rated to be of higher value than those from “junk sites”.

Bing does prevent Web sites from appearing in its search results if they use techniques such as using hidden text or links within their Web page or create link farms to artificially increase the number of links, the Microsoft executive added. However, he did not elaborate on how the checks were implemented and executed.

Google adopts a similar stance, according to a company spokesperson. He explained that a site’s ranking in its search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms that incorporate hundreds of parameters. “Our algorithms are effectively designed to prevent people from manipulating the rankings of competitors in our search results,” he added.

Yahoo, also a major player in the search market, declined to comment when contacted.

Farming for content
Both companies’ response might be deemed timely, especially following reports that some sites are turning into content farms to improve their SEO standing.

In a blog post on ReadWriteWeb, Demand Media and Answers.com are quickly blazing up the chart of top Web properties in the United States. Citing September 2009 figures from research firm ComScore, Answers.com climbed from 26th to 13th position over just two months, while Demand Media spiked from 24th to 15th over the same period.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Answers.com has 38 million pages of content on its site–much of which is user generated–while Demand Media churns out 4,000 new pieces of content a day. It further noted that the swift climb by the two sites suggests that “to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump hundreds of pages of content every day, preferably thousands”.

Blog site TechCrunch described the phenomenon simply as: “The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.”

Wired magazine also published a report noting that Demand Media created three specialized search algorithms to pick out the most sought-after subject matters and keywords that Web users are searching for at any given moment. It then uses the results, and assigns these keywords to a dedicated pool of freelance writers who would rush out content, written around the keywords, to be published online.

“Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort–because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work,” Wired said.

Disputing allegations that the company was a “low-paying content mill”, Demand Media’s senior vice president of content,Jeremy Reed, said: “In this day-and-age of publishing, where so many decisions are driven by the need to cut or eliminate costs, we’ve gone to great lengths to develop a community of really qualified writers and put them in a position and environment to create quality articles.”

All content has value
According to an industry analyst, there will always be users who appreciate online content regardless of its quality.

Chris Perrine, COO and executive vice president of Springboard Research, said in the field his company plays in, “more is more” with regard to information.

Unfiltered search results provide its researchers with the most details and information they need for their jobs. “For the research field, you would want a wealth of information, and sometimes even a sub-par article can lead a researcher to a new piece of information or insight,” Perrine told ZDNet Asia.

He noted, however, that other industries’ requirements may differ. For instance, a marketing manager looking for media coverage may be hindered by the mass of information he would have to sort through on the Web. There is also a “difference in value” between the Wall Street Journal’s content, for instance, and those aggregated by a random site, Perrine added.

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Webmasters perform search engine optimization (SEO) and want to get high search engine ranking in Google because it is the most popular search engine in the world. However, you must aware that Google is very strict in fighting against unethical manipulation of search engine ranking.

To  optimize for top Google ranking, your SEO effort must alert the following:

Basic Google Optimization Principle

SEO means to make your website appealing to visitors and search engines through proper practices, and your Google optimization effort must not involve tricks to manipulate search engine ranking.

Website Structure and Content Development

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. The key point is a clear hierarchy, and reachable from static text link.
2. Offer a site map. It is a very important SEO element for Google to index your web pages and assign appropriate search engine popularity scores (link popularity) to your web pages. It is particularly useful for large websites.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content with words users would type to find your pages . Google clearly states that they love information-rich website. So, SEO should emphasize on content development, and not SEO tricks. Of course, it is important to optimize webpage content.
4. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you use images, make sure you provide descriptive and accurate ALT tags.

Avoiding SEO Spam

The fundamental works for SEO or Google optimization is to ensure only search engine acceptable practices are used, that is, make pages for users, not for search engines.

If you or your SEO company implements unacceptable SEO practices or tricks, your website can be banned and removed from search engine index. This is especially true for Google. From experience, they are very determined to fight against search engine spam.

Therefore, you must alert that your optimization efforts do not commit in unacceptable SEO practices listed below:

1. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.” Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines , for example, showing different content to search engines than to users, or present HTML version to search engines and present Flash pages to users . Serving up different results based on user agent can be perceived as cloaking.

2. Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques : white text on white background, use of CSS display:none or display: hidden to hide text, including text behind an image via DIV tag or layering techniques, small font size such as setting font size to 0. Some SEO companies believe that Google cannot detect spam if CSS tricks are used. Unfortunately, this is wrong.

Links can be hidden including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques: link consists of hidden text, use of CSS to make tiny hyperlink such as text with one pixel high, link hidden in a small character such as hyperlink a hyphen in middle of a web page.

3. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Excessive keywords in a meaningful web page can be perceived as keyword stuffing. Proper SEO must take care of this element.

4. Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, Google will choose one of them to list.

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, Google also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. Google implies that your website or whole network of websites can be penalized with low search engine rankings or removed from their index. Are you willing to take this risks and continue to build shadow websites?

For some reasons, if you cannot avoid duplicate content, Google suggests you can make use of robots.txt file to avoid Google indexing duplicated web pages or websites.

Alternatively, you can re-think of consolidate duplicated pages into 1 or expand each page to contain unique content.

Conclusion

SEO is not meaning of applying tricks to manipulate search engine ranking. SEO is about making a website search engine friendly and trustworthy, and building reputation to your website. To be search engine friendly and trustworthy, you must avoid unacceptable search engine optimization practices described above. If your SEO service provider is committing to those practices, stop to use them now and remove all spammy elements before your site get banned.

Information is provided by Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd, a SEO service provider.

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Notes: Is this a new trend for search?  If this is a trend,  search engine optimization firms have lots of thought.  Do search engine optimization firms need to get their clients listed in those vertical portals?  and different clients should get listed in different vertical portals?  How search engine optimization firms ensure clients with local focus get top rankings?  Please read on.

We’ve noted before how the Seattle area — for whatever reason — has become a hotbed of innovation when it comes to finding recipes on the Internet. And now one of the region’s tech giants is entering the virtual kitchen, looking to help consumers cook up everything from chili to cheese tortellini.

The Microsoft search engine Bing unveiled a new way for people to search for recipes, pulling those creations and more from sites such as MyRecipes.com and Microsoft’s own Delish.com. The search results include photos, ratings and nutritional information. They also allow cooks to search recipes by season or special occasion, allowing someone to find green chili cornbread stuffing for Thanksgiving or a deep dish apple pie for Fourth of July. If someone actually wants to locate the instructions to make a specific dish, they must click through to the partner Web sites.

The move is yet another example of how Microsoft is looking to segment search results by trying to go deeper than Google in certain niche categories. (Travel and shopping are two other examples).

I asked Steve Murch — a former Microsoft marketing executive and current CEO of online recipe site BigOven.com — for his take on the move. BigOven’s 170,000 recipes are not yet indexed in Bing, though Murch said he’d welcome the opportunity to distribute his recipes through the search engine.

“It’s great that Bing is focusing additional resources on helping cooks find great recipes faster and in a more consistent manner,” said Murch. “It’s one of many examples of various key verticals in search getting more structured over time.”

Of course, having so much recipe information residing in Bing could prevent cooks from clicking through to the partner recipe sites.That means a cook could spend more time perusing Bing than say AllRecipes or other recipe sites.

“While that trend will adjust the economics a bit for those companies that rely exclusively on advertising revenue, those that have structured data and productivity, publishing and grocery list tools like BigOven.com end up with a great vehicle for awareness and search engine optimization,” he said.

That’s good news for companies like BigOven, which last November became the first major cooking site to open the vault on its recipe database to outside developers. But Murch also noted that the move could challenge food writers and old media content producers.

“Over time, it’s our belief that those who take a more platform-based approach, that have the most comprehensive data, let users put data into the platform and then fetch it from anywhere and manage it using complementary productivity tools, generally stand to benefit as the search engines continue to structure their search,” he said.

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Microsoft and Apple are reportedly discussing the possibility of changing the iPhone’s default search engine from Google to Bing, which experts say could be a significant change in the fast-growing mobile search marketplace.

BusinessWeek quotes anonymous sources as saying that “talks have been under way for weeks,” and that Microsoft was a “pawn” in the deepening feud between Apple and Google. The competition has been growing fiercer since Google began competing with Apple in the mobile market with its Android OS and Nexus One smartphone.

Additionally, BusinessWeek says that Google is in danger of suffering financial losses if the rumored move to Bing is made, since AdMob reports that most mobile advertising in the U.S. is viewed on iPhones and iPod Touches. The iPhone is the most popular smartphone in the U.S., so any changes to its default programming are likely to produce measurable shifts in mobile search figures, according to analysts.

So, is there any new opportunities for mobile search engine optimization (SEO)?  I think search engine optimizer and SEO company should think about this especially if their clients want to get exposure in mobile phones.

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To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web–such as seconds-old Twitter “tweets” reporting traffic jams–Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters to keep returns relevant, according to a leading Google engineer.

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Over at MIT’s Technology Review, they have the goods on how Google ranks tweets. Ok, like your regular old organic results, they didn’t learn the secret sauce. But they did get some good info on how you can optimize your Twitter account so your Tweets have a better chance of appearing in real-time search results.

Reputation is key. Who follows you determines reputation. If your followers have a lot of followers, that gives more authority to your tweets.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, [Google Fellow] Amit Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But Singhal also told Technology Review it’s not a popularity contest. They also have to weed out the noise. Hashtags make that task difficult. And sorting through trending topics when so many people are Tweeting is a challenge, too.

Singhal pointed out that Twitter the only source of real-time information for Google. Sources such as blogs and news are also relevant and being weaved into the real-time search experience.

Takeaways:

1. Cultivate your following on Twitter.
2. Don’t overdo the hashtag.
3. Be comprehensive in your real-time efforts. Don’t just focus on Twitter.

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