xcoder - 8:35 am on Sep 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Although we've barely discussed it here, I also see significant changes (up and down) with the growing need for a plus sign [+] to ensure that a word is included in the SERP. This is a kind of "update" or tweak that seems to be happening a good bit in recent months. Some longer tail query phrases are generating bizarre search results because of these changes, with lost rankings for pages that actually DO contain all the keywords.

"Instant" is probably a major resources hog. There is just no way in hell they can service so many billion of database queries in real time and display results within milliseconds without first having to break the mass historic queries database they already have into pre determined "suggested" key phrases. This way they can kind of pre determine the results, cache and deliver them almost instantly. This also explain them being way off target for so many searches lately... you often get results close to but not really exactly matching what you are looking for unless using the + sign.

I've noticed this while meeting with a customer once. We were checking together the google keywords suggestion tool for "how to *choose* blue widgets" which showed approx 1,500,000 searches per month for our target market, and the customer then suggested that maybe we should also go for "how to *select* blue widgets" ....and lo and behold, the keywords suggestion tools showed ZERO searches per month for that very same target market (impossible). This made me think that what they are actually doing is changing/matching queries into pre determined stored key phrases, most likely designed to reduce database stress...

In other words, for "instant" to work it MUST go hand in hand with "keywords suggest (aka auto complete)".... and together they are a real "long tail" killers...