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By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard of or even tried out Google’s lat­est search inno­va­tion — Google Instant. The new fea­ture lever­ages Google’s deep search insights and data crunch­ing abil­i­ties to try pre­dict what users are search­ing for and serve results even before they’ve fin­ished writ­ing. As users are typ­ing their query Google is con­stantly refresh­ing the web­site with pre­dicted results.

While it has just been rolled out in the UK and US to users logged into Google this week, and so empir­i­cal data is scarce, there are at least two early indi­ca­tions to how this will impact search marketing:

Paid search is get­ting increas­ingly impor­tant for brands that want to be found. With the lat­est update Google is fur­ther push­ing the organic (non-paid for) results fur­ther down the page.

Impres­sion counts will go up. Any pre­dic­tive search result that is shown for more than three sec­onds will count as an impres­sion. This will undoubt­edly inflate impres­sion vol­umes in par­tic­u­lar for head terms that are fre­quently used in begin­ning of search queries. Exactly how this in turn will impact click-through-rates and cost-per-click is yet to be seen.

What do you think of Google instant — love it or hate it?

Related posts:

1. Search is about Humans, not Technology
2. A more human search
3. Noth­ing for Google to worry about…yet
4. Match­ing Land­ing Pages by Search Intent
5. Tag­ging video to get a first page rank­ing on Google