Google Instant Will Plunge Advertisers Into a Street-Level War for Dominance
Google (GOOG)'s new super-fast, letter-by-letter search result offering, Google Instant, appears to rank results partially on location and user history, which could have huge implications for brands and their online promotion efforts. For instance, someone typing "A ..." into a Google Instant-enabled browser instantly gets results for Aol in the U.S., but the same letter in the U.K. sees instant results for Argos, that country's catalog discount shop.
In the U.S., "R ..." pulls up supermarket chain Ralphs in Southern California, but Reasor's grocery in Tulsa, Okla. Google Instant's regional brand bias was discovered by commenters who posted more than two-dozen comparative results underneath this Ad Age story about which brands dominate Google Instant results. The geography factor wasn't a secret:
Just typing the letter "a" into the search box and doing nothing else auto-completes the first word as Amazon, or, AOL, depending on browser history and geography.But its level of specificity was not widely known. Among the differences:
- Zatto, Zillow and Zumba are fighting it out for brand dominance of the letter Z.
- UPS and USPS are head-to-head for U.
- Staples, Sears and Skype are in a three-way war for S.
The differences seem trivial at first but will be magnified once Google Instant rolls out on mobile phone browsers. If you've tried searching for something on a smartphone browser, you'll know that the less typing you have to do, the better. Companies that can dominate search results for just one- or two-letter searches can expect to reap millions more hits than those that require a full word for relevant results. Couple that with Google's location-aware mobile ads, and you can see that for many marketers SEO will suddenly become a street-by-street, block-by-block battle.
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Image: Google homepage as seen on the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street.