Malcolm Colmes pointed out yesterday the slight update to Google Instant which allowed the use of keyboard shortcuts. After hitting return, a user can navigate the results by pressing the up and down keys. With the PPC ads at the top and highlighted first, this means many more users may click through on the paid for ad rather than the organic listings.
This could prove a problem for many advertisers who bid on their own brand terms. While the benefits of this strategy included reiterating the message from the organic listing …

I think it’s a bit early to speculate how Google Instant will affect user behaviour, and there’s certainly a lot of buzz that it could fall out of favour like so many other recent Google endeavours, but could Google Instant stupefy search? I don’t mean in the same sense as auto-spelling corrections, but couldn’t users decide to just settle for semi-relevant results instead of seeing their actual search query all the way through?
Take for example the VisitCalifornia.co.uk PPC ads. In the past, users searching purely for ‘California’ were served a …

One of the first most enjoyable things about using Firefox is the Google search enabled address bar (seemingly the specifically designated Search bar to the right is just too far to stretch to). While this solves those annoying error pages you get when you misspell a URL like in some other browsers, the real joy comes from the default search engine used in the address bar actually being Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky. Although the button on the Google site is undoubtedly one of the most commonly seen buttons on the …

I unfortunately feel a little ashamed that I never cottoned on sooner as to WHY Google Buzz existed. I was quick to recognise the Nexus One as merely a funnel for user data aggregation, with the eventual goal somewhere along the line of creating a more semantic web. Perhaps the anti-Google community’s doubt that’s beginning to spread through the blogosphere as the giant struggles under it’s own weight is turning me a little ignorant, but Fast Company has laid out the fruit of Google’s plans for Buzz here, and it’s …

Paid Search is often very mistakenly considered by some to be intrusive advertising. Many see it as  the product of Google’s abuse of trust, and the friendly giant’s inevitable fall to the darkside. But, providing the advertiser maintains to Google’s overall recommendations on how to beat the beast and questions some of the more Google-beneficial suggestions, then the advertiser has the potential to provide a service matching that of the organic listings.
Google Adwords isn’t the price a user pays for the free use of Google, and the fact that some …