Google claim that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search” and that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback.

Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. Users on domains other than Google.com can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account.

Here are some “Did you knows” from Google:

• Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and we saw many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type.
• Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
• If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.
• 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.

You can read more about Google Instant at the Google Blog.

Read more and watch an interview from cnet looking at Instant in more depth.

Below is a video from Google explaining Instant

I’ve been playing with Google Trends – a tool that analyses a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. (Don’t try to understand it!!!) Click here if you want to read more about how Google Trends works.

I ran one on social media.….

What do you think were the top 10 regions and cities that searched on social media?

What do you think was language most searches for social media was conducted in?

You’ll be surprised by the answers – click here to find out. The graph below shows the trending for Social Media from 2004 to now – not surprising.

There are various ways to find stats on your blog – depending on what platform you use. WordPress (my favourite FREE blogging software) provides a number of stats, but I like Feedjit – which is a free app I’ve put in the sidebar of the blog (L-hand side). More on that in another post….

A check of traffic in the last 4 days revealed the following:

• 3% came from a Yahoo search (wow – didn’t know anyone used that anymore!!!)
• 7% came from a link on another blog
• 12% came from Twitter
• 15% came from a website that has a permanent link to my blog
• 27% came directly ie they have me bookmarked or on an RSS feed
• 36% came from Google searches

Interesting stuff & there are some pointers there as to where I should spend my energy for the greatest return. Even more interesting is to see what terms people use to search & subsequently find you. Here’s what some backtracking through Feedjit showed me:

• Someone from Canada searched on ‘hold a video conference’ and my blog came up 170 out of 22,700,000 results.
• Someone from Florida, Moscow & Jakarta searched on ‘CUVC’ (a new product in my industry) and my blog came up 2nd out of 72,300 results.
• Someone from Minnesota & India searched on ‘define telepresence’ and my blog came up 3rd out of 200,000 results.

This gives me some good information about what people are currently interested in & therefore the topics I should be covering and the terms I should be using for the best search engine results. I might add that I pay no fees to anyone to attain the great results in the above searches – I just keep providing good information that others read, pass on & link to. Something that you can do on your blog to get yourself high in the ratings

You can join the on-going discussion by clicking the ‘Reply to topic’ button on the WNA Facebook page.

My videoconference blog that I referred to is here. I’ve included links below to my online presences so you can see what these spaces look like.

Set up your own Facebook profile and link to others as well as join groups and start your own groups. My Facebook page is here.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook – but a little more business oriented. My LinkedIn profile is here.

If you want to reach the teen/early twenties market then go to MySpace and Bebo (I don’t play in these spaces).

Why not set up your own social networking site using Ning? Here’s a Ning site I set up for Web 2 tools in business.

With Twitter you have 140 characters to speak to the world. See my tweets here.

Slideshare is a free website where you can upload your slide presentations. My Slideshare space is here.

You can upload your own videos to YouTube and also use it to collect good videos about your industry and share with others. My YouTube channel is here.

Ustream allows you to broadcast your own TV show via the Internet.

At Flickr you can upload & store photos. You can refer people to your photo stream and/or link to the photos from other websites. Here’s a flickr page I set up for conference photos.

Store your favourite websites at delicious and share them with the world – or keep them private. Here’s my delicious links – you’ll see a lot in the tag eLearning.

Scribd is a place to share your articles. You can see mine here.

Netvibes will organise your life for you. Use it to go and check all the blogs & websites you want to keep track of. Here’s a tour of Netvibes that explains how it all works.

Google provides many great free tools. We use Google Docs to work on shared documents. See the whole range of Google tools here.

I’ve written about Blogs in a previous post. If you want a simple blog use Blogger – or WordPress for more sophistication. This blog operates on WordPress.

I’ve written about Wikis in a previous post. My favourite wiki tool is PBWorks but also good are Wikispaces, Wetpaint and Google Sites.

Enjoy!

You can join the on-going discussion by clicking the ‘Reply to topic’ button on the WNA Facebook page.

My videoconference blog that I referred to is here. I’ve included links below to my online presences so you can see what these spaces look like.

Set up your own Facebook profile and link to others as well as join groups and start your own groups. My Facebook page is here.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook – but a little more business oriented. My LinkedIn profile is here.

If you want to reach the teen/early twenties market then go to MySpace and Bebo (I don’t play in these spaces).

Why not set up your own social networking site using Ning? Here’s a Ning site I set up for Web 2 tools in business.

With Twitter you have 140 characters to speak to the world. See my tweets here.

Slideshare is a free website where you can upload your slide presentations. My Slideshare space is here.

You can upload your own videos to YouTube and also use it to collect good videos about your industry and share with others. My YouTube channel is here.

Ustream allows you to broadcast your own TV show via the Internet.

At Flickr you can upload & store photos. You can refer people to your photo stream and/or link to the photos from other websites. Here’s a flickr page I set up for conference photos.

Store your favourite websites at delicious and share them with the world – or keep them private. Here’s my delicious links – you’ll see a lot in the tag eLearning.

Scribd is a place to share your articles. You can see mine here.

Netvibes will organise your life for you. Use it to go and check all the blogs & websites you want to keep track of. Here’s a tour of Netvibes that explains how it all works.

Skype allows you to make free voice calls, videoconferencing or instant messages over the Internet. You can also make very cheap calls to regular phones – great for overseas calls.

Google provides many great free tools. We use Google Docs to work on shared documents. See the whole range of Google tools here.

I’ve written about Blogs in a previous post. If you want a simple blog use Blogger – or WordPress for more sophistication. This blog operates on WordPress.

I’ve written about Wikis in a previous post. My favourite wiki tool is PBWorks but also good are Wikispaces, Wetpaint and Google Sites.

Enjoy!