ComScore to know how to figure out which search engine was tops. The same simple method was how Google knew to add your “marilyn manson” query to their global list of search queries and to your personal search history, a running tally the company stores for 18 months. And for the advertisers who spends thousands, even millions of dollars a month on text ads, it’s how Google calculates how relevant their ads are — which determines how much it costs to be the top ad for a given search term.

All of that got a lot more confusing Wednesday with the introduction of Google’s “Instant Search,” which starts showing you search results, based on what Google is guessing you are searching for, as soon as you type the first letter into its search box.

So what counts as a search now? Well, if you click on a result or an ad, Google counts its guess as your search term, which makes sense. But what about other searches, where you type in “wea” and Google guesses “weather” and shows you results that answer your question, without you having to click anything.

For these, Google instituted a three-second rule. If you pause on a page for three seconds or longer, Google registers that as a search. It’s then added to its master tally of search results, to your search history, and to the search count for AdWords.

For AdWords spenders the new search tally could be problematic. Every ad gets a rating of how effective it is — its click-through rate, which is the number of times the ad shows up divided by the number of times the ad was clicked. If that number falls low, it becomes more expensive for the advertiser to keep it in the running — on the theory that if an ad isn’t clicked, then it’s not relevant. And if the number falls low enough, then Google finally makes it ineligible.

So now as a user types a query, ads and results are updated instantly on the screen, but according to Google, only when a user clicks on a search result, an ad or pauses for three seconds will the query count as impression. AdWords charges for each click, not per impression (as many display ads are charged), but the new search change could affect the so-called quality score for an ad, making it more expensive or getting it banned.

The change also makes life far more difficult for Comscore, which uses sample groups of users to compile monthly statistics on which search engines are gaining or losing share. The company’s measuring score relies heavily on the notion of users typing in a query and then hitting return. That’s hardly going to work with instant search where the return key has largely been rendered useless.

Google vice president Marissa Mayer told Wired.com after the event that the company had reached out to Comscore today to inform them of the changes so the company can adjust its scoring algorithms, something Comscore was already in process of changing.

That’s partly because elements of “instant search” have already made their way into search engines. For instance, Google changed how it handled misspellings earlier this year so that it would search on the corrected term automatically, rather than showing a user a link to its best guess, which when clicked would launch another search. That change should have dramatically cut Comscore’s measurement of Google’s search share, and the number of search queries, when, in fact, it really didn’t change its share at all.

In June, Comscore acknowledged that search was getting harder to calculate and that it was working on a better methodology. As for today’s news, a Comscore spokesman told Wired.com that “We are still evaluating Google Instant Search,” so it was unable to comment.

According to one industry insider, Comscore’s numbers have never been very good, and the press often overblows what are essentially meaningless small changes in search share. And since Google has remained pretty consistent at the top of the search pile — capturing some 60 to 70 percent of the search market, it’s never been particularly concerned about Comscore’s rankings.

Either way, even if Google’s searches got faster today — search just got muddier to count and talk about, even with the new three seconds in the search results lane rule.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Google Debuts ‘Instant’ Search (Updated)
• Google Lets You Sign In to Multiple Accounts at Once
• Google Users Search More, Very Loyal: ComScore
• The ComScore-Google War Rages On
• Users Just Keep on Binging
• Bing Dings Yahoo In First Month, But Google Remains Untouched

Authors: Ryan Singel

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