Luis Fernandes: Online Marketing Professional for High-Tech Companies

Mozilla released FF3 a couple of days ago with it’s “Firefox 3 Download Day” campaign and it’s already made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most software downloads in a day.

There are many new features worth mentioning including, improved performance (vroom!) and more sophisticated security and privacy controls. However, there’s only one feature that I wanted to write about in this post since it may impact search behavior and search engine optimization (SEO).

Firefox 3 includes a ’smarter’ location bar that learns more about your browsing behavior in order to serve up more relevant searches when you type words in the location bar. Dubbed as the as the ‘awesome bar’ by the prototype testers, it works much like Google’s Web History but with an added feature of adding your own list of keywords to different search engines you choose.  You can add/edit your list of “smart keywords” by clicking on the integrated search field in the location bar > search engine of choice > Edit Keyword :

Next, add the keywords you want, as many as you like separated by a comma, and click OK.

I’ve added some already to test it out, so don’t get confused

So, what’s the big deal? Well, to be honest, probably not a whole lot to worry about here unless users get really lazy and stop exploring other related keywords – leaving out more options for other highly relevant Web sites. I see this as a possible concern since as web marketers, we’re constantly looking for new keywords and key phrases that are widely used but still do-able from a ranking perspective.

Having users keep a list of their most common keywords for each search engine could mean that over time, they settle on those keywords sets rather than exploring new keywords related to their search. If you think ranking is tough now, just think if we had to all compete for a smaller set of keywords…

Let me stress that this post is more about a what-if scenario rather than me forecasting a doom and gloom situation that is inevitable for search marketers. I’ll leave those conversations for folks like the Scobleizer. For now, this seems like a pretty innocuous feature, probably one many users won’t even use. But, I suppose it’s a good thing to keep mindful of how technology changes like these can impact search behavior over time.

Let me know what you think about about FF3, features like these, or other things that can impact the way we currently search the web.

Good Luck,

L