The Brilliant creative team blog

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a new feature when I’ve been using Google – it’s called Streaming Search. This is breaking news on the web, and apparently I’m one of the ’lucky’ few who’ve been chosen randomly as guinea pigs for testing.

In summary, Streaming Search causes Google to start populating the page with results the moment you start typing in the search box, and continues to update as you type further. This leaked video shows how it works:


At first glance it appears that the only benefit of this feature is to remove the necessity to hit the ’enter’ key. That’s just lazy, isn’t it? But it’s a move which is in keeping with Google’s current battle to stay ahead of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which seems to be piling on the functionality in an effort to eat into Google’s market share.

The big news is that Streaming Search has got everyone in the e-marketing industry talking about how it will effect Google AdWords. There is a concern that if the search results page updates every time you make a keystroke, then hits on adverts will shoot up causing Click-Through Rates to go down. Furthermore, Streaming Search is also trying to guess what you’re searching for, and therefore limits the competition for top search results.

If this feature is rolled out, then it could result in a period of transition for marketing agencies trying to understand and capitalise on this structural change to benefit their clients.

However, it’s worth noting that Google engineers are famously encouraged to spend 20% of their working day experimenting with pet-projects that interest them, and this currently falls into that category. Many industry experts are saying it might not go anywhere. Watch this space...