O'Reilly Interview with Stephan Spencer on the Impact of Google Instant

This is a clip of Stephan’s interview about The Impact of Google Instant on O’Reilly.

Does Google's instant search make SEO more important or less important?

It makes it more important because then you're going after more competitive terms because autocomplete will give you more competitive terms and more popular terms. I see. Those are the ones you have to chase after.

So, the same rules still apply?

Yeah, the same rules apply.

Right. Speaking of SEO rules and lessons, is there application of those on the social side? You know, social search is becoming more important. Is there an SEO component to that, or is it a totally different mindset?

Well, social and SEO definitely go hand in hand, but in different ways than you might expect. For example, when you're trying to get link bait seeded into social media, to get that critical mass, to get the viral piece of content to take off, a social news site or social bookmarking site like Digg or StumbleUpon or something like that becomes crucially important to get your link bait to take off.

From the standpoint of whether Facebook is going to kill off Google, I don't think so any time in the future. But it is another venue for people to search. In fact, YouTube is a social site. It's a social network. And it is actually the number two search engine. It gets more queries than, say, Bing or Yahoo, which makes it crucially important to get good visibility on YouTube.

Okay. How about on the mobile side? What do you see happening with mobile SEO?

It's interesting because local is a much bigger issue than mobile. Local is Google Places, and that's integrated now into the main web search results in a much more comprehensive way. They're interspersed. These places results are interspersed within the organic results. So it's almost like they become organic results themselves. So it's crucially important to have good visibility in Google Places, which is a whole different set of rules in terms of getting visibility. So, having a whole bunch of physical locations becomes a huge asset to you if that's the case.

Mobile search results are now integrated into that, but it's no different from regular web searches. You'll find that the mobile results and the desktop-based Google web results are pretty much identical. So it's not like you're getting mobi results floating up to the top now. That's true.

Sure. Last question I have for you. It's expanding the boundaries of this a little bit, but how does mobile search need to improve? Does it need to be revised in terms of how you interact with it? Do we need different input mechanisms for it? Do different expectations come along with it?

You know, I think the bigger vision here is that we will be talking to our computers much more than we will be typing at them. Because it's just an antiquated way to communicate. We speak much faster than we than we type. So, the advent of the LUI, or linguistic user interface, is going to be as big of a transformation for us, for humanity, as the advent of the GUI, or graphical user interface.

Remember the days when we were typing into MS-DOS? And so forth. Thankfully, those days are long gone, but imagine: Just a few years from now, we'll be talking to our computers much more than we'll be typing at them, and that will completely transform how we interact with them.

We'll be conversing with them, we'll be asking them questions, we'll be listening for their answers, and we'll be mobile doing that anywhere in the world. So, I think we'll see significant changes, like the Google mobile app and so forth. It'll be much more of a linguistic type model. And then what we're currently having, but also augmented reality, I think, is going to become massively huge in how we use our mobile devices, overlaying intelligence on top of the camera view that we're currently panning around looking at.

Well, thank you very much for being with us. I appreciate it.

You bet.

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