Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea—people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search- as -you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search- before -you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed. As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant . 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. Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant: Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need. Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for. Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down. Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth: To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google. The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. 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! As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms. We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

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Search: now faster than the speed of type

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog ) William Jefferson Clinton has worn many hats over the years. He served two terms as the 42nd President of the United States. He founded the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative to tackle problems like global health, poverty, education and climate change. He’s spent much of this year leading the recovery effort in Haiti through the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund . And starting now, he’s taking your questions in our latest YouTube interview . To participate, visit www.youtube.com/citizentube and use the Moderator platform to upload your video question for President Clinton—and vote for the ones you like the best. You can also submit a text question if you can’t record a video. Later this month, at his annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting , President Clinton will sit down with us and answer a selection of your top-voted questions in our interview. Submit your question and start voting early! The submission period closes on September 13. Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube News and Politics

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President Clinton takes your questions on YouTube

by Stoney deGeyter Clichés are a funny thing. We don’t like to hear them… especially in movies, TV shows, or blog posts, but we frequently use them in everyday conversations. Clichés are a great way to make a point because the meaning of them is pretty much universally understood, even if not entirely true. Just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it can, or should be, disregarded. Here are some clichés that we can use to help us better understand SEO. Good things come to those who wait We’ve all heard the expression, “Good things come to those who wait”. Whether you’re waiting for your Heinz ketchup to pour out onto your burger, waiting for Christmas day to open your gifts, waiting for summer vacation to be let out of school, or waiting in line at the BMV, good things will come if you simply allow them to come in their own time. But, under normal circumstances, this cliché is largely untrue. You’ll still get your ketchup if you shove the butter knife into the bottle and drag it out onto your burger, you’ll get all of your gifts if you choose to open them all on Christmas Eve, you’ll get your summer vacation if you skip the last few days of school, and you’ll still get your drivers license renewed if you go to a BMV express. The real lesson behind this particular cliché is that patience is a virtue. And that much is true, especially in search engine optimization. Unlike placing sponsored ads via Google AdWords or Microsoft Advertising, where results are almost instantaneous, SEO does not produce immediate results. You won’t get your return on investment a week after SEO starts. Optimizing your site for your targeted key phrases won’t get you to #1 overnight. You won’t find all your keywords rankings in the top 10 on Google in 19 days (despite some claims you read), nor will you get significant traffic improvement after an hour of SEO consultations. To use a simple analogy, SEO is like boiling water: you don’t get a hard boil the moment you turn on the burner… you have to wait for it. The process of optimizing a site can take weeks and, in some cases, months or years, depending on how big the site is. In most cases SEO is an ongoing process with growing measures of return. The return in SEO is good, but you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to let it happen. Can’t Hit the Broad Side of a Barn from the Inside The front end of the optimization process can include hours and hours of research, site architecture, and fixing usability issues. This isn’t even considering the actual optimization of specific pages. Everything from keyword research, industry research, competition research, marketing research, and more, all need to be completed before any optimization can begin. We often get asked if research time can be shortened if we have performed optimization work for another site in the same industry recently. The short answer to that is “no”. Every site has different construction, design, layout, history, and each speaks to it’s audience differently. These are all factors that are considered in the multiple levels of research performed. No two sites are the same; therefore no research is the same. Sure, some elements of the research can be applied, but you can’t just take what works for someone else and apply it to your site. Cloning a competitor never works. But, outsmarting a competitor does. Nothing to Write Home About A good SEO will actually write or re-write content to properly (and effectively) work in your targeted keyword phrases. We often put “SEO writer” and “copywriter” into two different categories, with the SEO writer being someone less skilled than a “real” copywriter. This is a fallacy. An SEO copywriter is a “real” copywriter that also understands how keywords get worked into content. Any copywriter can be trained in writing SEO copy. But, if you’re not already a writer, forget trying to write SEO copy. Any programmer can throw keywords on a page and call it “optimized”, but that doesn’t mean it is. A professional writer should be able to take the SEO recommendations for keyword usage and incorporate that into existing content in a way that reads naturally (i.e. does not look as if you just tried to insert keywords here and there for search engine relevance) and maintains the ability to convert your visitors to paying customers. This is no small task and should be done with the utmost time and care. You Can Take It or Leave It “Code bloat” is probably one of the most overlooked parts of the SEO process. Eliminating page code bloat can be an incredibly daunting task. Removing excess tables and re-coding in CSS, moving CSS and javascript code off the page, and generally making the code as lean as possible can make a considerable difference to page download speeds. Since Google, and likely other engines, are looking at speed as a significant factor, “code bloat” removal becomes an essential part of the SEO process. There have been times where we have had to nearly rebuild entire pages, removing tons of excess code. These changes may only add fractions of seconds to download speeds, but those can weigh heavily against other sites that may be running much faster. Even a Broken Clock is Correct Twice a Day Validating your SEO code has no effect on your search engine rankings. I want to make sure you’re clear on that… so I’ll say it again. There is ZERO SEO benefit to having your code validated. However, as an SEO, I’m a big proponent for using valid code. When code isn’t validated it means there are coding elements that are incorrect. While browsers and search engines can be extremely forgiving on these errors, there are some coding errors that can stop the search engine spiders cold. The error may prevent them from reading the paper properly and, consequently, not assign values of your content correctly. Again, validating your code won’t achieve good rankings, but it can help prevent you from getting poorer rankings due to confusing and improperly created code. If you validate your pages, it is easier to find potential problems as you continue to make edits. If one of your pages has 50 warnings but no problems with the search engines, great! But, let’s say you edit the page and you now have 51 warnings, and this new one is crippling. That error is just another one in the group and, unless you’re paying attention, you won’t even know it’s there. On the other hand if you have zero warnings or errors and after an edit you see one pop up, you can correct it before it becomes a crippling issue for you. All Things Being Equal “Site maps”, “custom 404 redirects” and “robots.txt” files are all important to the overall construction of your site, even if they don’t necessarily have a direct effect on the actual on-page optimization of your site. Site maps help both search engines and visitors quickly and easily get to the information that is important. A “custom 404 redirect” eliminates that annoying “page not found” error and lets you keep visitors on your site if they somehow access a page via a bad link. The “robots.txt” file is useful to communicate with the search engine spiders about content they should or should not index. This allows the search engines to focus its time on the good stuff instead of the irrelevant portions of your site. Up against a similar site, these things can help you keep visitors engaged with your content and prevent them from jumping off to a competitor. It’s often the small things that can make the biggest difference. There are a lot of nuances to SEO and, with that, there is often a lack of understanding from those that are not directly involved. Even still, quite a bit of bad information is easily spread. You don’t have to know SEO well in order to understand it, but having a basic understanding of SEO can help you converse intelligently with your SEO provider. Turning a blind eye to the work they do often leads to incorrect assumptions and false expectations. Having a better grasp on the needs of the SEO will help you ensure that you’re both working to keep the SEO project on track and not chasing after pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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6 Clichés That Help You Understand SEO

How many times have you created a new account at a website and seen a message that said: “Thank you for creating an account. To activate your new account, please access your email and click the verification URL provided.” Even though you just want to start using the website, this lengthy process requires you to manually perform a whole bunch of steps—including switching to your mailbox, trying to find the message the website sent you (which might be in your Spam folder), opening the message, clicking the link, etc. Until recently, we also required people to follow these steps if they wanted to sign up for a Google Account using their existing email address, such as a @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or other address. To make this process simpler, we’re now using an Internet standard called OpenID which is supported by several email providers, including Yahoo!. Instead of the process above, Yahoo! users who sign up with Google see the page below with a button that sends them to Yahoo! for verification. Once you click that button, Yahoo! shows you a page to get your consent to share your email address with Google. After you agree, you’re done and can start using any Google service, such as Google Groups, Docs, Reader, AdWords, etc. We have found that a much larger number of people complete the email verification process when this method is used. In the future we hope to expand this feature to other email providers, and we also hope other website operators will read more on the Google Code Blog about how they can implement a similar feature. Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security

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Simpler sign-ups for Yahoo! users with OpenID

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “ Google Apps highlights ” and subscribe to the series. - Ed. Recently we introduced powerful, time-saving features in Gmail: Priority Inbox and the ability to call phones right from Gmail. Google spreadsheets added new features, and many more businesses and schools moved to the cloud with Google Apps. Cut through the clutter with Gmail Priority Inbox Since its beginning, Gmail has been helping people cope with large amounts of email, whether it’s with more than seven gigabytes of storage, really fast search, great spam filtering or automatically organized conversations. This Monday we launched Priority Inbox , which helps you get through your inbox even faster by automatically putting important messages front and center. The more that you use Gmail, the better Priority Inbox will become at categorizing the email you receive. Our research suggests that the typical information worker can save a whole week of work time each year with this feature! Call phones from Gmail People in the U.S. can now call any phone right within Gmail. If you have a Google Voice account ( it’s free! and open to everyone in the U.S. ), you can also receive calls to your Google Voice number right within Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free at least until the end of the year, and international rates start at just $0.02 per minute. Google Apps customers won’t see this feature quite yet, but Google Voice and call phones in Gmail are coming soon with the new infrastructure for Google Apps accounts. Improved scheduler in Google Calendar Last Thursday we made it easier to set up new events in Google Calendar. The interface for repeating events is now more intuitive, and we’ve improved how we help you find a good time for your event, even if you’re coordinating a large group of people with busy schedules. In-cell drop-down with validation and more in Google spreadsheets We added two helpful features in spreadsheets last week as well. In-cell drop-down with validation allows you to configure cells to display a drop-down menu of accepted values. For example, you can require a cell’s value to be selected from a list of specific cities. We also introduced the ability to easily see which cells have formulas , which can come in handy when you’re working on a complicated mode. You can turn this feature on from the formula bar by selecting the “Show All Formulas” button, selecting “Show All Formulas” in the View menu or hitting Ctrl `. Who’s gone Google? The pace of organizations saying goodbye to legacy on-premises technology and moving into the cloud continues to accelerate. Read more about why The Richmond Group , Box.net , Bowerly Lane Bicycles and EPS Communications selected Google Apps for their messaging and collaboration needs. I hope these updates help you or your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog . Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

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Google Apps highlights – 9/3/2010

by Mike Fleming If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad.� You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries.� Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order . Then, broad match became “expanded broad match” where Google’s algorithm was given free reign to decide if search queries were a close enough match in search intent to show your ad.� Many of the results were not even close.� Your keyword could be business cards and your ad would show on state ids and business plans . The overwhelming advantage of broad match of course is that you get more impressions, clicks and conversions; although you most likely would have a lower conversion rate that will make you pay more for each conversion.� So for some it works and for some not so much.� The major disadvantage is that you have to spend time going through your search queries very often to weed out those that are not applicable to your business because you paid for clicks state ids and business plans . But now, Google has given us another option that offers more flexibility in balancing the tension between traffic and relevance; the old broad match and expanded broad match.� It’s called modified broad match .� This option has greater reach than phrase match, but is more controlled than broad match.� How? With this match type, if you put a plus (+) sign in front of a word in your phrase, AdWords will only match your keyword to search queries that contain that word exactly or contain a close variation of the word . Google defines a close variation as “misspellings, singular/plural, abbreviations/acronyms, stemming (like “floor” and “flooring”) and synonyms.� They say related searches like “flowers” and “tulips” are not considered close variations. So basically they are allowing advertisers to choose between the old broad match, newer broad match, or a combination of the two.� You can choose to “bring in the reins” so to speak on broad match and decide which words in keyword phrases are necessary in the search query for their ad to be triggered.� So, you could do this: business +cards This means card will not be matched with id or plan but only cards exactly or close variations of it (card, etc.).� Now, this still means that you could get matched to id card; so if you want to further filter your possible matches, you could go with: +business +cards This functions like the old school broad match.� Now business will always mean business and cards will always mean cards. This really takes the realistic number of possible match types up to 6 or 7.� Here’s a really cool graph that shows the match types, their relative reach and an initial bidding strategy for each. If you would like to test these match types out, choose a couple ad groups where you are struggling, copy them and use the new ad groups to replace your broad match keywords with modified broad match. � Modify your broad match keywords and set their bids between the your broad match and phrase match keywords.� Then, after enough data has collected you can analyze search queries and conversions of each ad group to see the results and adjust using your reports. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Google Improves Control of PPC Exposure With Modified Broad Match

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand. So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements: Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy . Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well. We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies. In addition, we’re adding: More content to some of our product Help Centers so people will be able to find information about protecting their privacy more easily; and A new privacy tools page to the Google Privacy Center . This will mean that our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place. These privacy policy updates will take effect in a month, on October 3. You can see the new main Google Privacy Policy here , and if you have questions this FAQ should be helpful. Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction. Posted by Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel

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Trimming our privacy policies

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand. So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements: Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy . Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well. We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies. In addition, we’re adding: More content to some of our product Help Centers so people will be able to find information about protecting their privacy more easily; and A new privacy tools page to the Google Privacy Center . This will mean that our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place. These privacy policy updates will take effect in a month, on October 3. You can see the new main Google Privacy Policy here , and if you have questions this FAQ should be helpful. Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction. Posted by Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel

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Trimming our privacy policies

It’s been 10 years since the first version of Google SketchUp was released, and there are more people modeling in SketchUp now that we ever could have imagined—over a million of you a week, in fact. That’s a pretty humbling number of 3D model makers. People around the world are modeling everything—from a new design for their kitchen to entire cities in Google Earth. For our small part in this global phenomenon, I’m proud to announce that SketchUp 8 , the next major version of our 3D modeling tool, is available for download today. We’ve added significant new geo-modeling capabilities that leverage Google’s vast collection of geo-spatial data to make it quicker, easier and more fun than ever to build models of the world around us. Head on over to our website for the whole story, or just grab yourself a new build and get back to modeling. Posted by Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager

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Model the world with Google SketchUp 8

More and more people are surfing the Internet from their phones these days. Take a look at the following graph. It shows the number of monthly visits to googlestore.com from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices over the past 2 years. There were 277 visits in Sep, 2008. But in July of 2010, there were over 13,000 visits! Given this kind of growth, it makes sense for many businesses to set up a mobile device-friendly site. If you’ve been considering whether to create a mobile site, you may want to check out the Mobile Devices report in the Visitors section. You can see how many visits you received from each mobile operating system, how many pages they visit on average, how much time they spend on your site, as well as see conversion and ecommerce information. In next week’s Back to Basics, I’ll show you how to create your own trend graph like the one in this article, so you can really dig into the numbers for your own site. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Back-to-Basics: How much mobile traffic do you get?