Although I believe that this will change the way people use Google, I don’t think that it will kill SEO (search engine optimization) or make SEO irrelevant, as Steve Rubel wrote. The search algorithm is still the same. As the results are refreshed while you type, we’ll probably see more and more people typing in order to pull results to the top that they consider most relevant, instead of typing, clicking (or hitting “enter”) and scrolling. Therefore I believe that long tail keywords will see an increase in traffic. But it also might make lower rankings less relevant. I guess that people will be less apt to scroll down and even more so go to page two of the SERP. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will affect our search behavior.

Google Instant will not make SEO irrelevant but it will most likely have a strong impact. I think it’s an exciting innovation that will make search engine optimization even more challenging, especially since no two users will see the same results.

What do you think? Will you keep it or dump it?

UPDATE (Sept. 17th, 2010): Stefan Tweraser, Deutschlandchef von Google spricht im internetworld.de-Interview auf der dmexco über Google Instant und äußert auch die Vermutung, dass durch die Neuerungen der Long Tail noch länger werden wird und dass sie wenig Einfluss auf White hat SEO haben werden.

They also decreased the size of the header and thereby moved the list of messages up by *drumroll* 16 pixels. Should I care about this? I’m not sure.

But what I really like is that they shed (most) rounded corners. Although such a visual feature is nice, it’s nothing more than pure eye candy with no practical use whatsoever. I assume that the Google Mail team threw these rounded corners overboard in favor of overall performance and I congratulate them for this step.

So what’s Street-Side all about? For that I would like to quote what Microsoft has to say about it:

Historically, maps give you a perspective of geographical information about a place. In Windows Live™ Local, powered by Virtual Earth™, you’ve seen road, aerial, and hybrid maps. Then, we introduced bird’s eye views to give you a perspective from above. Now, we want you to be there, right in front of the pizza shop you are searching for, in the street-side views offered by Windows Live Local. Even though you haven’t left the comfort of your computer chair, you’ll feel like you’re actually there.

At first glance virtually driving or walking around San Francisco or Seattle doesn’t sound very appealing to me because I’m more for the real life experience. But it might be a nice tool for getting in depth driving directions. That way you have the possibility to memorize landmarks, which usually are not part of “traditional” driving directions tools. At second glance it stresses Microsoft’s growing eagerness to grab a large slice of the web 2.0 cake. In my opinion this new feature together will Microsoft’s other new web based services also shows that there are quite a few creative heads in Redmond who do their best to help Bill Gates take a look outside the desktop box. But I don’t quite agree with Michael Arrington’s when he titles his post abou this new service “Killer New Live.com Service: Street-Side“. It’s just taking another step along the maps/satellite path. Of course now the perspective has changed to street level but I think it’s not as innovative as for example the introduction of Google maps was. But that’s just my two cents.

Wednesday saw the launch of Yahoo! Maps Beta, competing with Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth. Surprisingly Yahoo! didn’t jump on the AJAX train with their new service but rather use Flash, although AJAX may of course be used by developers using Yahoo! Maps API. I just found one fault with that new service. Their “world” is pretty limited and it doesn’t contain Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe or South America and blurs on the edges, so that you can’t zoom in north of Denali National Park in Alaska. Being beta doesn’t justify this North-America-centric worldview in my opinion. Their competitors have at least some data for the rest of the world available. For further descriptions, check out Yahoo! Maps: drag ‘em, search ‘em, hack ‘em on Yahoo! Search blog.

Yesterday Google announced the release of Google Desktop 2 and Google Desktop 2 for Enterprise, the latest release of their tool marrying their desktop search with third party plug-ins like up-to-date news, weather and the like. A tool I won’t be able to use on my primary computer, for it’s a Mac.

In German there is the saying “Konkurrenz belebt das Geschäft”, which would translate into something like “competition animates business”. This is true of the developments we are currently seeing in the Web 2.0 game. I think that Google’s Gmail and Maps was kind of the “wake up call” for all the other companies to get moving again. So we, the users, really profit from this arms race since those big players started and will keep developing new services and improving old services for our good, eg. an improved user experience of the web.