What's Wrong With Google Instant? 7 Biggest Backfires

(Sept. 9) -- Pulling off a successful new product launch is no cinch, but at first blush, Google appears to have done it again with "Google Instant." And yet, less than 24 hours after the search giant debuted its latest feature -- which allows users to see a whole new list of search results for every letter they type -- a few grumbles have already started rolling in.

Just what's wrong with Google Instant? Surge Desk has the roundup:

1. It Produces Some Embarrassing Search Suggestions
Go ahead, begin typing a search query for the indie rock band Yeasayer or the classic old-school construction toy Erector Set and see what happens. Gawker's Maureen O'Connor did and found that Google Instant suggested some amusing, if momentarily uncomfortable, alternatives.

2. It Censors Sexy Searches
If Instant can be faulted for showing users things they'd rather not think about, it also seems to possess a paradoxically puritanical streak. At least that seems to be the takeaway from a piece by Cade Metz at The Register, who reports that as a matter of policy, Google has admitted to filtering the searches for "violence, hate and pornography." While Google argues that this is done for the sake of "child safety," in one case it wound up excluding search results for a reporter with the surname Slutsky. Metz notes that if you type a full dirty word in and press Enter, you will still be taken to the regular search results page, however.

3. It Induces Harsh Guilt Trips
On a related note to the two aforementioned points, The Washington Post's Post Partisan blogger Alexandra Petri explains how Google Instant not only sucks the fun out of searching for such simple pleasures as LOLCats and other related frivolities, but actually makes users feel bad for searching for them in the first place:

Back before there was Google Instant (if we with our online attention spans can remember such a time), when I tried to relax after a long day of work with some "ugly pictures of cats," I could. Old Google didn't judge me. Old Google didn't assume I was looking for something erudite. Today I tried to look up "ugly pictures of cats," and Google Instant assumed I wanted to learn about the USPS and then read an article about Uganda. I felt guilty, so I read them both. The postal service is in terrible shape, financially! So is Uganda! But this wasn't what I wanted. I wanted ugly cats.

4. It Kills SEO
"Search engine optimization" or SEO has been a buzzword among websites, especially news and entertainment sites, for at least the past decade. The basic principle is one of reorganizing online content to make it easier and faster for search engines, and search engine users, to find (or, more ideally, impossible to ignore).

But now that Google Instant shows a different list of search results for every letter typed, PR and tech expert Steve Rubel argues that it throws all the prior accumulated knowledge about SEO out the window. As he puts it on his blog, "Google Instant means no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible. Real-time feedback will change and personalize people's search behaviors."

However, perhaps more than all of these points, the SEO impact of Instant remains a matter of fierce contention. See The Atlantic Wire for more on this specific debate.

5. It Hurts Advertisers
Google is by far the leading advertising platform online, according to the most recent analysis reports, commandeering between 60 and 70 percent of the ad market in 2010, depending on whose estimates you believe. To put that in context -- and for full disclosure -- AOL was predicted to draw only 3.9 percent of ad spending for the same period. In addition, Google is aggressively pursuing the mobile ad market as well.

And yet, its core service, AdWords, is still centered around its search function. So what effect will Google Instant have on prospective advertisers? A potentially tremendously negative one, according to Search Engine Land blogger John Ellis, who argues by way of the following example: When a user searches for "Las Vegas hotels" on Google now, what will happen is:

Starting the query with "Las" shows ads for Las Vegas. Some of those ads are for hotels. Why would a user continue typing if they see hotel ads already? As an advertiser this forces me to bid on "Las Vegas" to compete. Thus, making me put more dollars in Google's pockets. This kills the need to bid on long-tail keywords. Users may never even get to "Las V..." much less "Las Vegas 5-star Hotels," "Las Vegas hotels on the Strip," "Las Vegas hotels on the North Strip," etc.

In addition, ZDNet blogger Tom Foremski predicts that people will spend less time looking at each ad because search results will change much faster, thus making each ad less effective and potentially coming back to bite Google in the butt when advertisers become more reluctant to spend money on ads they know won't be seen or clicked on as much.

6. It Will Take Your Money
On the flip side, TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis uses Google's own PR messages on Instant's ad potential to argue that "the more Google can serve up exactly what you want, the more you'll actually want it or put your money where your mouth is and buy it." At the same time, she and Google seem to think that advertisers will be more, not less, inclined to spend money for said targeted ads, thus further enriching one of America's already richest companies.

And finally, the argument against Google Instant that is perhaps the most common refrain from Google critiques since the service first launched:

7. It Will Further Erode Your Privacy
If you thought Google Suggest was bad (that's the service that Google implemented to predict what you are typing as you type it, based on both your prior search history and that of all other users around the Web), then you certainly won't like Google Instant. It takes that idea a step further, altering the entire page of search results according to what you are typing. As Web security guru Byron Acohido writes in a cautionary post at The Last Watchdog:

Google Instant rapidly fires different search results pages at you as fast as you can type a few letters of your search query. Many of the results flashing by will have images. This is Google's turbo-charged way to show off how it is able to almost psychically anticipate what you're searching for. Google can do this because it keeps close track of what users search for; it maintains massive data centers; and it has an army of brilliant software engineers.