Google is 20 years old
Can you remember a time when we didn’t rely heavily on computers for all our tasks?
Where did you find the answers to a question you had? Now we can just ‘Google it’!
The reason that Google became a term that we use (almost every day) is that it does so much RIGHT! It the very early days of Google we had to search in a certain way to get the results that we hoped for but it always worked.
Now in 2018 and Google is 20 years old it is still growing, changing and evolving. It will over the next 20 years continue to change how we search online. Google remains focussed on the USER and providing you with the answers you are looking for. They want to you get the highest quality information as quickly as possible and this will continue.
There are distinct changes coming in Googles Future of Search
- There is a shift from answers to journeys
- A shift from queries to providing a query less way to get information
- A shift from text to a visual way to find information
Search engines are always learning and as part of this learning, they are working to find out what the intent is or the reason that someone is searching.
This could be for:
- Information – to gain knowledge
- Navigation – to find a specific website
- Transactions – to buy something
- Investigation – to figure out the best item to buy in the future
- Keywords – using words like buy, voucher, how-to etc.
SEO also answers these questions so that your website is in the results. For example, if you are selling products you need the right words as part of your product pages. However, you also need articles about these products that are also optimised for search results. Ask My Sassy Business how SEO can help your business!
The Journey
If you have worked with My Sassy Business you will have heard the term ‘Customer Journey’. Google is also applying this and aiming to help you through the journey of doing business with another business. Journeys are going to be a large part of Google’s future of search. Google will know where you are in the journey so that you can discover and consume more content delivered by Google.
Google uses artificial intelligence to increase its understanding of languages and context.
“We’ve now reached the point where neural networks can help us take a major leap forward from understanding words to understanding concepts. Neural embeddings, an approach developed in the field of neural networks, allow us to transform words to fuzzier representations of the underlying concepts, and then match the concepts in the query with the concepts in the document. We call this technique neural matching. This can enable us to address queries like: “why does my TV look strange?” to surface the most relevant results for that question, even if the exact words aren’t contained in the page. (By the way, it turns out the reason is called the soap opera effect).” Ben Gomes – Googles VP.
What this means is that Google is giving the answers to a query based on it’s learned context knowledge. The knowledge graph is where Google holds it’s knowledge of connections to provide you with relevant results to your search.
Tabs you may have noticed already
The Activity Tab
Your journey will be available via the activity tab – It will give you the ability to retrace your steps during a search session. Only you will see it and you can delete it too.
The Collections Tab
You can group your activities so you can use them at a later date during your investigations online for a particular service or product.
Visual searching
Desktop searching is getting an AI (artificial intelligence) powered tool so you can analyse what is in a photo and search based that. You may be familiar with the app Google Lens that has been doing this for some time. Again SEO helps you to appear in these results.
AMP (accelerated mobile pages) stories are rapidly growing and providing an open-source library to create a story from the internet. You will notice this immediately with the news.
Featured videos will also be showing in your search results to give you the best experience online with Google.
Conclusion
Just as Google has grown over the past 20 years all small businesses need to grow and evolve over this time to ensure they are staying on top. Sitting back without a website or a website that is old and dysfunctional just won’t cut it. You will be lost in the results as Google provides the most relevant results to their searchers.
If you need help in these areas – contact Kelly at My Sassy Business
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