The launch this week of Google Instant – the new facility from the search engine giant – has created a whole new holy grail for people working in search engine optimisation.

The new incarnation of Google brings up search results on the home page as the user is typing the search terms. It predicts what the user could be looking for and automatically brings up the most likely results.

For search engine optimisation professionals, the challenge has been set to get their clients into that top, automatically generated set of results. Achieving that will be no mean feat, however, with nearly all of the top spots – in both the UK and US – currently occupied by global retail chains, phone service providers or social media networks.

Starting at the very beginning, for example, typing in 'A' to the search engine shows global internet bookshop, Amazon, appear at or close to the top of results in both the UK and US versions of the facility, falling only behind Argos in the UK results.

Matching up on both sides of the Atlantic are 'E', directing users straight to online auctioneers, ebay, 'F', listing social network Facebook at the top, and 'W', where the most commonly searched for word appears as 'weather'.

Other top searches in the UK include BBC – sections of which dominate the top 'B' terms – Hotmail, John Lewis and Next. Mobile phone providers O2 and Orange jostle for dominant position at the letter 'O', with O2 just emerging on top.

Perhaps indicative of the rise of internet abbreviations and phonetics in everyday spelling, typing in the letter 'U' – in both the UK and US – directs searchers to the video sharing site, YouTube.

Among public bodies, Transport for London and the DVLA are both close to the top of the automatic results, indicating the extent to which the public sector has successfully mastered web integration.

Google currently answers one billion search queries per day from all over the world, with varying levels of popularity in different countries. Describing Google Instant as a “fundamental change,” the company claims that the function will save global internet users a combined 11 hours per second, or 111 years per day.

The development is undergoing a stage roll-out across the world this week and is currently only available to users in the UK who are logged into a Google account. It should take the average individual search time down from around 24 seconds to 20 seconds. The company added that “dynamically predicting what people search for reduces the time it takes to enter a typical query by 50 per cent."