No one can ever accuse Google of not taking the adage about a rolling stone seriously and there is certainly no sign of moss gathering at Googleplex.
In a week which saw Yahoo! unveil its own, Microsoft-backed, version of real-time web search, called Search Direct Google forged even further ahead bringing the practicality and simplicity of Google Places which offer a means for businesses to acquire a powerful presence and new customers at no cost, to its ‘search at the speed of type’ initiative.
The new concept provides Google Instant results on Google Places which is designed, as Google explained in a Press Release to “save you a few more seconds each time you type a search”.
While the time saved may sound tiny in comparison to the effort required to roll out something like this it signals three things you really need to take seriously:
1. Time is a commodity which once spent you can never get back. Google gets this. They try to offer everything as fast as possible. Surfers get it also. Given a choice between a search engine which takes seconds longer to deliver and one which gives instant results it is easy to see which one they would go for. The approach is indicative of a trend on the web. Online visitors get irritated by slow-loading sites, slow connections, slow replies, too much hoop-jumping in order to get what they want. They have less time than ever and more things than ever to do. They want things to be reliable, fast and accurate.
These are factors which influence every website not just Google and as a webmaster you need to take this into account. When you look at your website in addition to considering usability, content, SEO and navigation, you now need to consider whether it loads fast enough to provide the kind of online visitor experience Google is trying to provide on their websites.
You need to look at factors which influence your website’s speed including website load time, the size of specific images, how long your banners take to load and the speed and stability of the servers you host your website with.
2. The quality of the end-user experience is everything. Yes, you may have great content on your website and you may sell the best products on the web. If your visitors have to struggle to get to it all you are on a losing streak from which you will never recover.
3. End-user behaviour is more powerful than functionality. Google uses technology to increase the quality of the end-user experience. Google Instant in search and now in Google Places has nothing to do with the quality of the results or any additional search functionality. The hugely complex technology which powers Instant for Google does nothing which could not have been achieved before with a couple of clicks.
What it does do is it takes away the need for those extra clicks which means that now, as an end-user, I, you and 89% of the planet who use Google Search become accustomed to drop down boxes being prepopulated with popular search choices without us having to type more than a letter or two of the search term we are looking for.
From Google’s point of view this is truly customer-centric thinking. They look at their operations from the outside in and that is a valuable lesson which any of us can apply.
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