Google Suggest: A death nail for …..

Google finally launched ‘Google Suggest’ feature across all the data centers, after it spent years in Google labs (better late than never). A post on Google’s official blog states “ Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box. We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently.”

Google suggest is a feature that provides suggestions upfront i.e when you start typing in the search box, related keywords/key phrases appear directly below where you are typing. It would look something like this:

It is easy to move your cursor down and select your search term. But what would this mean for keyword search, especially long tail keyword search. Well the answer is simple – it would effectively kill the long tail keyword search. To me it looks like a well thought strategy of enticing users into searching for keywords with high volume (and probably high bid prices, for PPC and Adsense, which would equate to more revenue for Google) and defining the SERPs even before the search is actually carried out.

‘Google Suggest’ is going to be a death nail for long tail keywords. When presented with suggestions, searcher are more likely to choose one of the options mentioned below than typing the whole search term. This would especially hold true in case of people unsure of what they are looking for and end up typing long keywords, but would not effect well defined keywords in a big way. I am not trying to say that people would be completely satisfied with what they are presented with, but it is most likely to be their first stopover. And for those who bank on misspelled keywords, the jolly old days are over.

Looking on the brighter side, companies targeting keywords that features in ‘Google Suggest’ or associated keywords should get ready to see a surge in traffic. To see if you are the lucky one, start typing in a query on Google.com and see ‘Google Suggest’ in action.