Today at the Google Press Event in San Francisco (at MOMA), Google unveiled the launch of Google Instant. It gives results instantly as you type by predicting what search you are about to do and then, not only making a suggestion, but also displaying the results before you even finish your query.

Google Instant was predicated by some fun logos – interactive bubbles yesterday, and a logo today that lit up as you typed in the search box. Google says they did this because they want search to be “fun, fast, and interactive.” Google Instant is currently available for Firefox, Chrome and Opera, and should be rolled out to IE8 and all other major browsers by the end of the day. It’s currently only available in the US, but should be international within the next week.

Marissa Mayer from Google spoke first at today’s event and went through a brief history of search – from a half-day to find something at the library in 1935 to about 30 seconds for a search in 2010. She said this was composed of about 9 seconds on average to type a query, and then about 15 seconds to select a result – plus time for the information to load.

What does this mean for you? An enhanced user experience.

Now, with Google Instant, the time it takes to type a query has been significantly reduced. In a demo, they showed a search for “w” bring up local weather for San Francisco. Login to your Google account and try it – it’s pretty cool!

How Does This Affect the Search Experience?
Most people believe that it will enhance the search experience. In testing that Google conducted, users liked the real-time results and the interactive quality of the search. In addition, the results are personalized (when you’re logged in), and this creates an even higher level experience. Another benefit for the user (although not necessarily for the advertiser): results now start appearing with one letter typed in the search box.

How Will This Affect SEO?
One industry pundit already predicted today that “SEO is dead.” After a swift response from the blogosphere and Twittersphere (is that a word?), no more such ridiculous things were said. As the collective agreed, personalization didn’t kill SEO, nor did Caffeine, so why would this? It just makes the experience more pleasing, and if it has any major effect at all, it’s that getting ranked in those top 3-5 results is even more important, because if people don’t like what they see, they’ll just start refining their query. It’s unclear right now whether people will conduct more short searches or more longtail searches; a case could easily be made for either. We’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, be sure to check out this video, by Google’s Matt Cutts, for more on SEO impact.

How Will This Affect PPC?
PPC results will likely have the biggest impact based on Google Instant. With predictive searches, the match types you use will be more important, and with users starting to get results with just one letter, you’ll have to fight harder to show up. But perhaps most significant is that there’s a change to how impressions will be calculated, which is likely to drive your impressions up significantly.

Look out for changes in how impressions are calculated.

Any of the following will be counted as an impression:

• An explicit commitment to the query (hit enter, click search button, or choose the query from autocomplete)
• A click on the page (ad, result, spell correction, related search, etc)
• Long pause while viewing the page (currently defined as 3 seconds)

Google says this won’t adversely affect your quality score though: “In general, all advertisers will be affected equally by Google Instant. Therefore, we don’t anticipate any changes in relative advertiser performance.”

And Finally, How Will This Affect the Industry?
It’s probably not a coincidence that this new technology is being released during the final stages of the Yahoo/Bing alliance. It’s certainly taken over the collective interest today, and probably will for a few more days as people play around with the new feature.

The bottom line is that Google has maintained the majority of the market share for the last few years, and just when it looked like Bing might be a threat, they’ve squashed them like a bug. Yahoo/Bing was predicting a 40% market share when they merged; I think that’s unlikely to be quite as high now. They’ll still be a major player, and you can’t ignore them, but it looks like the competition is going to be more interesting. And that makes for great news.

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