Google Chrome, SEO, and Google Suggestions
Thursday, September 4th, 2008With the release of Chrome, I automatically started to think about how the new Google web browser will affect search engine optimization. After using it for a few minutes it became obvious.
Chrome has a built in default feature which suggests alternative and refined search terms. For example, when I searched for “Jerusalem Hotels” I got the alternatives shown below.
This search for “Jerusalem Hotels”, illustrates how Chrome will influence the importance of certain search phrases.
Chrome will influence searches in 2 ways
- The alternative suggestions offered by Chrome will no doubt become more important keywords since they are now getting added exposure
- Misspellings of keywords will become less important since Chrome automatically corrects spelling and some people will click on the suggestions.
How can Chrome influence the search space if it has so few users now?
I can think of 2 reasons:
- The number of Chrome users will likely increase
- The alternative suggestion Chrome feature just became a default on Google search called Google Suggest
After 4 years in Google Labs, my guess is that Google decided to make Google Suggest the default in order to make sure it worked properly before making it part of Chrome.
It is interesting to compare the feature on Chrome to the Google Suggest feature shown below. Google Suggest has the same first 3 suggestions as the Chrome browser. However it has more suggestions and also shows the number of results available.
Google Suggest has graduated and is now part of Google Search
For some reason it doesn’t show the number of results for the original search term typed in by the user. In many cases the number of results is not useful. Does it matter if there are 591,000 results or 367,000 results?
On a local note, it is interesting to note that even though the Google development team that worked on Google Suggest is located a few minutes from my office in Haifa, Israel, it doesn’t work on the local interface — Google.co.il – in Hebrew or English
