September 03, 2008 | Wednesday

Google Suggest – Don’t Patronise Me!

By Henry Shelley - Search Manager in Marketing |News |PPC |Search Engines |Google |Search Technology |SEO

It’s not often that Google implements changes that ruffle SEO and PPC feathers simultaneously. The graduation of Google Suggest from beta, after four years of testing, has stimulated great debate in the blogosphere regarding Google’s true intentions.

The first point to note is that although Google Suggest is out of beta, there hasn’t been a complete rollout to all users. Presently, suggestions only appear on the home page of the Google.com domain and not in the search results page itself.

‘Suggest’ clearly enables Google to influence which keywords users search with and which set of results they find. This has got the cynics amongst us theorising that Google is therefore encouraging the use of more generic terms, increasing competition for a smaller sample of keywords and thus driving higher CPCs over time. Moreover, we may also see a drop in volume on misspelled keywords, which is also likely to push average CPCs up.

Certain brand terms could see a notable increase in searches through ‘Suggest’, for instance, any search query beginning with “travel…” will return the following brand terms as initial suggestions:

In this example 8 out of 10 suggestions are brand terms whereas the 2 remaining are very generic….not the broadest selection.

Primarily, Google Suggest may see marketers head back to the drawing board in trying to understand user intention and habits. Nobody really knows how this will reshape the market, or if user reaction may even be adverse for Google. (I for one feel patronised by the thought that Google can second guess what I’m looking for – but it’s not reason enough to use one of its competitors).