Google Suggest Goes Universal

Just look at what’s been recently published on the Official Google Blog:

Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.

So, the Google staff claims to be excited about this news. Now should we be excited about it as well? I’m going to share with you some random thoughts (and predictions) on this subject:

• This will affect the SEO and the PPC markets for sure. If you offer search engine optimisation and/or marketing services, get ready for a whole new bunch of trial-and-error experiments. The same goes for those who do SEO and PPC marketing only for their own sites.
• Will Google users become lazier? If so, many obscure long tail keywords may turn even more obscure, for web surfers might forget them in favour of the ones suggested by Google. That doesn’t mean that such terms will completely vanish though. There will always be someone dissatisfied with Google suggestions and/or independent enough to ignore them and type their own desired keywords.
• If you have pages that are optimised for misspelled terms, prepare yourself for a probable decrease in traffic. Terms suggested by Google don’t contain typos.
• Some users might not find the new feature as convenient as Google expects. There are searchers who get annoyed at auto-completion, scrollable boxes and anything else that changes as they type.

This is too recent, so no one can say for sure what’s going to happen. Searchers’ behaviour will certainly change, but nobody knows to what extent. I can’t even tell how my own behaviour will be affected — unless I activate Google Suggest from Google Labs right away, something I’m not sure I’ll do.

As time goes by and I manage to compile more information about Google Suggest’s impact on Internet users, I’ll write more articles to keep you all updated on this subject.