Google Instant - Domains impact

[whiterabbit]

Hi all,

With Google Instant now showing results as I type. Does this mean that I should be buying 4 or 5 letter TLDs for popular keywords?

E.g. If I bought the domain holid.com I would guess (with a bit of effort) this has a fair chance of appearing on screen as someone is typing holiday.

As long as I ensure what is appearing for my domain on Google results is "come here for your holiday info", wouldn't I intercept a lot of the traffic for holidays?

Are 4/5 letter TLDs the new gold rush? Or am I not understanding something?

WR

 

[springer]

But it doesn't work like that does it?

Eg typing 'holid' will display results for holidays as you are typing. So it is is already showing results for holidays. Eg if I wanted search results for 'POS' I need to actually hit enter to get them.

 

[jasman]

Heh, that's like when people bought ridiculously-long-hyphenated-domains.com just because for a brief period they seemed to rank well in search engines. Junk.

 

[whiterabbit]

Yeah - fair one, having played with it a bit more.

However, I still think this represents an opportunity to interdict existing (longer) search terms, if you could somehow establish your search term. Established brands with longish names would seem easy targets.

E.g. Say I bought EasyJ.co.uk and slap a cheap flights site on it. All I would need to do is game google for a bit so it recognised easyj as a term in its own right, and then I would surely take a %age of traffic that had originally been thinking of going to Easyjet. No?

WR

 

[stender]

And sit back and wait for your drs.

 

[whiterabbit]

I don't think Stelios does DRS, it's lawyers all the way with him

But DRS is protracted and if you're eating any %age of their profits in the meantime its easier for large corporates to just buy you out.

Do a couple of these, and you wouldn't even need to game google or build a site. It'd get picked up by the press and large corporates would approach you to buy the shortenings of their names?

Don't get me wrong - I accept there's a degree of risk here, but isn't there a potential upside?

Just trying to find a way of making money...
WR

 

[namealot]

Robbing banks only has a degree of risk... ? If you think that some might been seen sooner then reg one's that were not loooking like DRS all the way would probally be a better option...Look at the predictive words as your typing and reg those...?

 

[Ashton]

I am doing some interaction testing with google, it seems people use it the same way to search, just refining their results a lot more.

ie: Putting in 'cheap flights' not being happy with the results and adding 'to france' to see some more.

I think most people will just complete words, so easyj will not take anything from easyjet. (I think)

Of course this is all new and it will take a while for people to ease into a routine with it.

 

[whiterabbit]

Hmmm interesting. Would love to know the results when you have them Ashton.
Cheers,
WR

 

[scwebsites]

As Springer says, it doesn't work like that.

As a Google user types in a search term, the search results change, but they change to the first Google suggestion, not the exact match of what you have typed so far.

So if you type in EasyJ you will see the first Google suggestion is Easyjet, and it will show results for the search term Easyjet, not EasyJ.

So if you had the domain easyj.com, it would never show up unless of course you were in the top ten results for the search term EasyJet

The results shown are always for the first google suggetion.

 

[GreyWing]

My view is it will have less than 2-3% impact. At the end of the day something google can't change is the fact most people are looking at the keys that they are pressing rather than what is coming up on the screen.

The only thing it will change imo is the for searches with words that are hard to spell. Other than that it will be quicker for people to type a term in than type in a letter look at the screen, type in another letter, check again and keep doing that.

So wouldn't worry about it