Thought on SEO and Google Insight

EDIT: WHOOPS I MEANT GOOGLE INSTANT! SORRY! (long day) (mods please change title if you can)

Have been playing around with this a little bit - Some thoughts and observations, based purely on how it (kinda) changes my personal searching behaviour

Would love to hear other's opinions as well

In short: whoever said that SEO is dead because of this was just trying to get a quick headline (enviable marketing strategy, but they're still wrong). SEO is going to be very alive and well.

Here's what I personally think are going to be some shifts:

- Even more volume to #1 organic - my eye gets focused on what's coming up in the exact first spot as I'm typing in words. The other 9, not so much
- More really odd long tail searches (and in really odd orders) - as I start typing, if I don't get what I'm looking for, I seam to just be adding random words (ie "4 slice toaster detroit wal-mart target deal") as opposed to before where I might have just tried a different search
- less volume to page 2 - personally I find it a bit easier to keep adding words to try to find what I like than to see what's on page 2
- bump in traffic to certain shorter tail phrases that are on the way to long tail phrases - ie someone searching for dog training tips may find sites to look at once they've typed in dog training
- Higher bounce rate - something about this interface just makes me even more of a "fly by nighter" - the quick answers are feeding my ADD however in turn I'm just using that to quickly check out different things that pop up, then going back to google and looking again
- More "accidental finds" - I started typing 4 slice toaster and at "4 s" found my self needing to click on the site of "4shared.com" (maybe there's something about free sharing that just draws me in)
- Lower conversion on PPC - I seam to go through a lot of ads on the way to a longer tail search. It's likely, however, that everyone's conversion will go down the tube equally
- Harder for G to shut out spammyish sites that are in the index - to make this type of search happen, they must really be streamlining the algo. If a site is in the index, it's likely they can't have as many real time filters as before
- More of a crackdown on who's in and out of the index - just a thought of how google will react to the last point
- More volume towards trending type topics - from what I've seen in the predictive search, it tends to change, often around anything trending.

As well:

New tools I'd like to see:

new tool 1) something that can scrape the full list of what someone sees on the way to a term

ie if I type

dog training

I get a whole set of different terms for each letter

d
do
dog
dog (space)
dog t

and so on

I'd love to be able to put in one phrase and get a list of searches a user goes through on the way there

new tool 2)

something that can spam google's search so that a specific term comes up sooner in predictive search

All the time there's random weird stuff that comes up in predictive search. What's the best way to get the searches we want to the top of the predictive pile?

Once again, would love to hear the thoughts of other people on this.