Wearing my SEM hat firmly pulled down upon my head I began to test Google Instant.  There are already quite a few questions regarding how it will affect our day to day tasks and I feel that tracking the progression of each search as it occurs will have a large effect on the placement of ads at the correct time.  Simply allowing for a keyword phrase to drive traffic as it always has before will no longer work once your competitor changes strategies to get their advert displayed before the searcher has completed the phrase they’re typing.  Suddenly you find yourself in a race t

Google’s new search feature “Google Instant” was launched yesterday, see: Google Instant

In a nutshell, your search results are displayed immediately as you type each letter in the search box.  At the time of writing, this feature is still being trialed on Google.com, so you will need to log into your Google Account to use.

My worry is that the ads are constantly being swapped out. Here is Google’s impression criteria:

Marketers generally don’t audit their search campaigns. But when they do it’s mostly because their campaign results don’t meet expectations or performance isn’t going well as it used to. So what people usually tend to do is put their search marketing up for tender, hoping that a new agency will get them back on track. However procurement takes time and once a vendor has been chosen, they typically take 3 months to ramp up and precious time has been lost from initial RFP to seeing actual improvements in performance, if this even happens.

Remember 1999?  That rather wonderful moment when the advent of the web made everything possible and shattered the key economic principle that a business needed a revenue model to sustain itself?  And, of course, the promise to all of us that it would deliver fewer working hours, greater information and access to riches.  
 
The future gazing of 1999 confirmed one thing. Predictions are a mugs game and a really special kind of mugs game where technological advancement is driving change so very quickly.
 

In recent months I've been following the rise of content farms , a topic that a few journalists are starting to write about, but one that is already having a huge impact on the web.  These companies are churning out literally thousands of pieces of content every week.  In fact Demand Media - one of the leading companies in this space - is pumping out 4,000 new pieces of content every day -

Fear is a powerful force. Fear of the unknown, the new and change are pervasive, especially when Google's in the room. FOG (Fear of Google) seems to be gaining momentum, but how is it that one of the fastest growing brands in the world, seemingly much loved and out to do no evil is starting to elicit such a gut response?