Google Suggest is a great feature and works perfectly but I’ve never been convinced that it will change the way people search in a measurable way. Most of the people I watch performing searches (even tech savvy ones) tend to look at the keyboard as they type rather than the screen so they never see the suggested results.
Latitude has carried out some research to see whether search volumes for a host of suggested terms have increased since Google Suggest was launched in the UK towards the end of March.
From the image above (you can see the full scale interactive version at Google Insights for Search) you can see a big jump in search volume for the suggested terms between March 29th and April 4th – right when Google Suggest was rolled out.
Based on these statistics, it can be estimated that search volumes have developed in the following way between March and June 2009:
- Car Insurance Quotes – up by 64%
- Car Insurance for Young Drivers – up by 103%
- Car Insurance Compare – up by 52%
- Car Insurance Comparison – up by 9%
There was a big jump around Christmas too but that was the same the previous year – the March/April jump didn’t happen any other year which means it’s not a seasonal thing.
Of course correlation doesn’t imply causation and there may be other Google features at work here such as the related search results displayed at the bottom of the search results (although these tend to reflect branded search terms at present).
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Search Google for “74 wpm walk 3.5 mph” without the quotes. In order to take the typing test one had to look at the screen to see what to type.
It would seen to me that if you knew what you are looking for that looking at the advice has no advantage. Of course if you didn’t know what you were looking for the advice would be a great starting point.
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You can have great fun with Google Suggest by typing ‘[famous name] is’. I got Prince Charles is antichrist, David Cameron is sexy, and Gordon Brown is … a lot of rude words. Full examples here.
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