We know that customers have become increasingly impatient with ever increasing broadband internet speeds.  Instant Search is certainly a good way to hold ever short attention spans.  Although it is too early to tell how customers will respond to this. 

It is interesting to see how Google is phasing in this feature, apparently it is not available everywhere.  It depends on which browser and country you are living in.  Perhaps this feature is being ‘dark launched’ in each location without the usual formalities of announcement and worldwide presence.

http://www.keenobservers.com/3724/google-instant-search-unveils-but-google-instant-not-working/

Another question is whether Microsoft’s Bing be able to keep up with this development.    Clearly this capability is placing a massive load on Google as serving up all this additional information requires processing power and bandwidth.

Instant Search may mean that Retailers may need to adjust their Search Engine Optimisation strategies, providing shorter site summaries for rapid consumption by customers.  Retailers may also need to raise the bar for Site Search on their own websites.   Will retailers be able to adopt InstantSearch–style capabilities for their own sites?

Avinash Kaushik wrote a great post about tracking offline conversions at Tracking Offline Conversions: Hope, Seven Best Practices, Bonus Tips.  I interviewed Avinash last year about his book in this post – Q&A with Avinash Kaushik, Author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.

On Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, they talk about their latest improvements in indexing Flash content in Improved Flash indexing.   I still wouldn’t use a great deal of Flash for an e-commerce site, but it’s good to know that they are making progress on improving this area.