Members Topics and Google Instants by Tony Thornby (Living Streams)

MEMBER TOPICS

I am pleased to report that I now have a topic from a member of the Chamber to explore in this column – ‘Building a Social Media Community’. Research has begun to expand my own experience on this with ideas of specialists in this area: It is my intention that the first entry on it will be here in late October.

All members of Marlow Chamber are invited to suggest additional topics for this column.

LOVE IT OR HATE IT GOOGLE 'INSTANTS' IS COMING
Over the recent past, you will have seen a lot of changes in Google search - e.g. the addition of images and videos, short-term inclusion of social media entries, the ability to select type of search results and choice of how recent the entries should be.

Now Google is rolling out instant search results as you type. The feature is best described pictorially (see the series of 4 screenshots below):



The global rollout of Instants is now occurring, but in the UK it is only operational currently if you are logged into a Google account.

If you do not want to have Google predict what you're searching for, 'instants' can be turned off with a link to the right of the search box (as shown in the 4th screenshot above).

If you're wondering why Google has introduced the feature, an explanation can be found at http://www.google.com/instant/

For those of you who use Google Adwords there may be concerns over untargeted 'impressions' of your adverts: Google's statement on this, can be found at http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187309