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Wow ... what a day this is turning out to be. If you're into search engine optimisation ... and if you're a webmaster that's exactly what you should be into ... then Google's Instant Search should have had you riveted to your computer for quite a few hours.

Of course you may not have had much time to stop and think about it ... especially if you've been busy submitting, building or worrying about ePassporte so let me give you a brief rundown on what's happened.

A couple of weeks ago a few people noticed that if they had already done a search in Google and were refining that search they would begin to see the search results changing as they typed. That was both interesting and a little scary.

It was interesting because Google was able to serve up search engine results as you typed and scary because ... well just think of the data processing power Google now has at its fingertips. Sure we all knew that Google had a bazillion servers spread around the globe but now we can see exactly what all that computing power can do because while it's serving up instant results for you it's also serving up instant results for millions of other people all at the same time.

Back then Google was obviously testing its systems and after a day or so the tests seemed to stop but now they're back and they're not tests ... they're Instant Search and they are going to change things.

Fortunately for those who are doing nothing but adult marketing Instant Search has some filters that immediately blank out the instant search results as soon as an adult term triggers the filters. So if you did a search for 'hardcore porn' it would start to display search results that included Harry Potter but as soon as you began to move into the '...ore p...' the results disappear and you actually have to hit the enter key to get any results.

So adult webmasters aren't going to feel the adverse impact of Instant Search ... but for mainstream there is an adverse impact. Many believe that long tail searches ... searches for terms that contain three, four or even more words ... are going to drop off considerably as people see the short results appear on their screens. If you're doing pay-per-click in mainstream you may begin to see more impressions than you did in the past as your Adwords ad pops up more frequently ... but gets ignored.

Steve and I have also noticed that Instant Search now combines results from searches that a user may have already made if at least one of the words in the search term is the same.

For example if did a search for 'widgets' and clicked on one of the links that Google gave me in the search results that link is almost certainly going to appear if I then do another search ... even at some later date ... for a multi-word term like 'golden globe widgets'.

At the same time it may also add in a 7 pack of businesses (if I'm doing a search for a locality) and we're also seeing right down at the bottom of the search results page a listing for "Results from people in your social circle for ....".

So interesting times are ahead of anyone who is trying to get a good listing for a competitive mainstream term but don't believe anyone ... no matter how well-known they might be ... who wants to tell you that SEO is dead. I noticed today that one very well-known marketing guru, the moment he saw that Instant Search had been released, just had to tell everyone that SEO was dead.

He's wrong ... he's clueless ... and even Google (via their spokesperson Matt Cutts) says he is wrong.

Now a few minutes ago I did say that Instant Search wasn't going to have a major impact on those of us who want to get a good listing for adult-related terms ... and that's certainly the case if you're competing for hardcore terms. However if you're chasing softcore terms things may be a little different.

For example, if you do a search for the term 'breasts' you do get results ... but I didn't see many results - certainly not the standard 10 search results per page ... when I did a search for that term and none of them were adult-related. However, that doesn't mean that you can't get an adult listing for a softcore term.

Several webmasters that I know have seen some adult sites appearing for softcore terms so Google's filters aren't infallible and it's not impossible to get your site listed. I'm not sure what you would have to do to achieve such a listing because I haven't been able to replicate what others have seen but it must be possible and it's certainly worth trying to get such a listing.

And that's it for me here this week ... sadly I'm not going to be able to play some more with Instant Search. Instead I'm off to install some software on a client's computer.