Google on Wednesday (8th September) announced the release of ‘Google Instant’. This change made to the Google homepage allows for live, real-time “Search as you type” results updates. When you start typing your query, Google immediately starts offering results based on the prediction of the fragments already present.

Google Inside AdWords blog gives an example: “if someone types “flow” into Google.com, our algorithms predict that the user is searching for “flowers” (the predicted search) and therefore display both search results and ads for “flowers”. However, if that user then adds the letter “c” to the query, our algorithms may predict that the user is searching for “flowchart” and show the corresponding natural and paid results for flowchart.”

Screenshot of Google Instant in action

Interestingly, the results vary for every individual as it depends on your web history and location to offer up appropriate predictions.

From a BBC article Google estimates the typical user will take 9 seconds to enter a query and a further 15 seconds then looking through the results for answers. Google Instant Search is claimed to be able to cut between 2 and 5 seconds off a typical web search. They reckon that could be 11 hours saved globally every second.

All magical of course, however this is going to bring some serious changes to the future of SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website or web page more visible in search results. It actively tries to push your site higher up the results list for potential visitors to find your site first.

Why is it affecting your SEO?

For instance “with Google Instant if you searched for ‘red striped socks’ you’ll whizz through results for ‘red’ and ‘red stripe’ first, but as these produce listings on the DVD rental company Redbox and Red Stripe beer, they’re unlikely to hit the term ‘red striped socks’.”

It is stated in a Telegraph article that Google’s main system for deciding relevant search results has not changed. So this means if you search for something in both static and instant Google, you will get exactly the same list of results. Google Instant just autocompletes your search query as you type, offering up results on-the-go related to your half-complete search.

It now appears you may need to capture the attention of the searcher earlier to create an SEO instant winner.

Further reading:

Mashable poll results – Google Instant Vs. Regular Google

The official Google blog has some interesting articles upon Instant Search if you are interested and want to read further. Take a look here and here.

Google is not the only search engine, even though it does control around 85% of the international search engine market. Please remember with SEO to remember the little people (Yahoo, Bing etc.)
(Stat from: netmarketshare.com

A nice link on an SEO’s point of view -
http://tupalo.com/en/blog/pass-through-impressions/

With HTML5 & CSS3 constantly peeping round the corner (iPad sites, HTML5 article) we need to prep ourselves to deliver client’s rich websites to the highest standards. There’s a lot of changes going on and during the transitional period we’re updating our CSS font-techniques at Thought Den.

The industry
The font industry is apparently in a bit of turmoil for both designers and producers. The Font-designers are trying to hold onto their previous/old/out-dated/”wake-up and get with the times” print-based payment model. While the web-based font factories are trying to break it the business open into a mass/does it make profit/lowering standards/can it make money iTunes micro-payment model.
Then, the producers (us in the Den!) are trying to deliver our clients (you!) (or “you!” soon, after you’ve contacted us) a sexy web-package that will work across the most browsers and by using a technique that will last longer than a flash-in-the-pan 5 minutes.

What did we find?
There are currently many articles to help guide and inform the decision, namely from the popular web standards site, a list apart. This article in particular, “Web Fonts at the crossing” has helped round up the current full technical details,
- HTML5 & CSS aren’t fully supported everywhere yet
- IE6 to IE8 can only support a particular type of font extension
- Firefox, Chrome & Safari are pushing the boundaries
- IE9, it sounds like Miccy-soft have made an Internet Explorer browser half decent!

Thought Den will… (client round-up)
… be using the new tools/bold technology for making sure your site and its fonts are viewable across as many browsers as possible so it’s readable on many devices as possible.

Thought Den will… (techie round-up)
… be using the @font-family tag with,

Google Code (for hosted fonts)
- http://code.google.com/webfonts

Embedded Fonts (for creating fonts)
- http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Restricted Fonts (for expensive fonts)
- http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

Onwards!

Ladies and gentleman it’s been a while. I won’t spend long on the soap-box, and where possible will stimulate with moving pictures, not words, but the important new is – Adam Vernon has joined Thought Den and hopefully you’ll come to love him as we already have (despite his gammy eye, though he insists it’s a new, Bristol-based affliction. He moved here especially you see! A good stat for Bristol Media perhaps – Thought Den drag Edinburgh graduate 400 miles to new Bristol studio)

Below is video 01 from our new Geek Club series, charting the Den’s trials, tribulations, banter and revelations. Think Blue Peter, without the bog roll tubes. Or HP Labs, but with less money and more sellotape.

Adam says :

“It makes use of the OSC protocol (likely eventual successor to MIDI), which is normally used to transmit musical and audio control data over UDP. The iPhone app, TouchOSC, is designed to be used as an OSC controller and also supports transmission of accelerometer data, indicating the orientation of the phone. The UDP packets are received by a Java flosc server, running on the PC, which retransmits the OSC data over Flash-friendly TCP. On receipt of a packet, Flash assigns the received orientation values to the rotationX and -Y properties of a cube made with the Flash10 3D API.”

Word on the street is that we’ve moved studio. An official (and thoroughly imaginative) announcement will follow forthwith. Isn’t it a shame that ‘real’ work gets in the way of devising these witty and clever ways to let you know we now stare at different coloured walls when Firefox crashes? Soon your inboxes will sing to the sound of Thought Den’s latest self-indulgent, digital distraction. Curious? You should be…

September 09 was a good month for Thought Den. There were subtlemobs in the pipeline and igFest09 was still leaving a warm fuzzy aftertaste. But most importantly, there was the prospect for the company to invest in a brand new sexy server to host all our clever sites & games.

Back then, in the haze of Autumn we read-up on and whittled down a list of providers to choose from. Deciding strongly to not be swayed by the sexiest newest thang’ out there with ample blinding gizmos, BOGOFs to fill your boots with and then all backed with snazzy marketing.

And we picked the Rackspace Cloud Sites. Knowing them to be a solid provider, we were already using their services on the clever  Parashoot site and their offering is aimed directly at companies like ourselves.

Rackspace cloud sites logo

So 6 months down the line… what do we think now? Is the snazzy server still flying high or have we needed to clip it’s wings? Here’s out personal thoughts so far. Bad news first as always!

The Bad news: We’re thinking clippers because…
- Setting up FTP is a chore. An actual chore.

- No SSH. We can’t do nippy logins, scp our files to the server, no mass chmod’ing. But now there’s no chance to accidentally “recursively delete” a whole folder+contents in one swoop.

- After setting up a domain aliases like “thoughtden.com” to point at your “thoughtden.co.uk”. The .com won’t accept emails, unless you give in and just create a whole new site.

- Web access to PHPMyAdmin is trial and error! There’s about 50 different databases choices to log in to, and they’re labelled by number, not name…
Enter the username & password, select database number 1, click login. wait….. nope. Enter the username & password, select database number 2, click login, wait…. nope. Hmmm.

Good news: Flying high because….
- Blazingly quick to get started!

- Simple & clean interface THROUGH-OUT the site. Very easy to use & navigate. Very easy.

- Pretend FTP details to login into your site while you’re waiting for the DNS to point. Makes our development really easy.

- Support. It’s just like Rackspace’s Fanatical support. Always useful, always speedy.

- All our sites are running up to speed.

- Dan’s free T-shirt all the way from America for saying “hi” in a blog-post.

Dan looking a goon

Conclusion: Good far outweighs the Bad, it’s still Flying!

A question we asked ourselves last month as we wrapped up Parashoot. At first it seemed it definitely couldn’t be when the internet at your office fails and you have to establish a makeshift testing office in your front room. But what business hasn’t at some point eked out its existence, whether through infancy or old age, in the homely surrounds of an attic, spare room, garage or garden shed? Behold the rigour and beauty of our testing process, from iPhone to Dell netbook and Mac Book Pro.

On the plus side, having our server rack replaced by a fully functioning Ignis oven meant brownies were forthcoming, and thus IE6 was conquered. From here on in, IE6 will not be supported, in much the same way these admirable countries have stated their case against.