What Do the New Google Search Results Really Mean?
3 Mar
Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.
Over the past week, I have been reading a lot of blogs which have been discussing the new Google search results. Of course, the major focus has been on the impact it will have on the ranking of search results – what sort of an impact your sites will receive, how to avoid it, or whether it will kill off niche sites that have been generating an income for hundreds/thousands of people over the years. The one thing I have not heard much about is: apart from the complaints about results from content mills trumping the more valuable content, why would Google change their algorithms?
I have been thinking about these ideas for a while, and a post over at The Sales Lion (Google Search Results, the Death of Niche Sites, and Why Inbound Marketing is the Future of SEO) triggered a response from me. Marcus suggested it was like a follow-up blog post to his own comments. After thinking about it for a second, I had to agree, hence this post.
I havve been listening a lot to the TWiT network of podcasts (mainly TWiT, TWiG, and Net@Nite), and there been two related messages over the past year or so.
- People discover products, services, news, etc. more through their social feed than by reading news sites or search.
- One of the aims of Google is to give you the answers to questions before you even think of the question.
The two are related to me because the only way Google will fully discover and understand how a person behaves is by following the social groups they are involved with. Google has made search results more personalized in the past by including links of people you are connected with at the bottom of the page (but not to the full extent that it could be), as well as, providing local results without any input of a city or area. They have also been more predictive in search results through Google Instant (which I mentioned in my post about Google replacing Artificial Intelligence).
By eliminating a lot the garbage sites from their results, they can zero in on pages that your friends from your social networks are more likely to click on, the pages they retweet, that they like on Facebook, that they shop from, etc. This creates a curated and personalized search experience for you. It will still include algorithms to figure out what your social network is doing and push those results higher. The garbage sites will drop dramatically in search results as they become less referenced by your or anyone’s networks.
The problem for Google is collecting all that social data to build those personalized search experiences, and having to compete with similar services.
John Battetlle wrote about the reasons why Google is not leaning too heavily on using Facebook exclusively for search results. He writes:
I think the company does have a bigger vision, and I think it’s rooted in the idea of instrumentation and multiples of signals (as in, scores if not thousands of signals understood to be social in nature). In other words, there is not one “ring to rule them all” – there is no one monoculture of what “social” means.
Facebook, with its 500+ million users, is usually referenced as the epitome of digital culture. It is the largest venue for sharing content right now to your social network, and one of the most popular areas to discover the best products to use or buy through their “Like” system. The latest (popular?) search engine to show up blekko, has incorporated search results based upon the number of Likes the page has received (TechCrunch article about blekko going social). Twitter is growing, but people use Twitter in a different way than they do Facebook. Twitter is public; Facebook is private.
Twitter and Facebook are not the only social networks we have, though, nor do they include all our social data that would be valuable to Google. We don’t include every video we watch on Netflix or YouTube through those channels, nor our purchases on Amazon, iTunes, or Zappos. If I wanted to learn more about what my friends recommend doing, I would be more interested in the movies they are watching/purchasing, or which banks and special accounts they have setup. This would be a huge task to complete that may be made easier as people use Facebook Connect or OpenID to connect their profiles to certain sites. I am not sure how much access Google or other companies have to that information, but they could start taking on the task of developing a larger social graph for people, whether it is based upon demographics, geography, or your own social network.
Google is one of the few companies that I can think of that would want to develop a personalized search for users. Facebook is more interested in keeping people locked into their environment (an idea I wrote about nearly five years ago now, Living in the Immersive Age) than they are in helping people discover new products. Twitter is probably better off staying as it is. Other social networks, like FourSquare, Quora, LinkedIn, don’t have the desire to expand into searches like this. The only other company that comes to mind that may have the means and the desire to do something similar would be Amazon. Why buy the #1 book in the United States, when you could buy the #1 book in Duluth, Minnesota (an isolated city like that must do a lot of reading in the winter time). It would help you discover which products worked best for losing weight within your social group, or the best horrow movie to rent.
With everyone’s concerns being focused on page rankings, they lose sight of the bigger picture of the importance of the shifts Google is making. This is not about eliminating the content mills from search results and punishing people with poor search engine optimization tactics. Instead, it is a push towards creating a more complete social graph of people’s searches by identifying which links people use and stay on, instead of bouncing away from immediately.
The future of search is not entirely about content and linking in. The future of search is going to be personalized to point out what your social network is looking at online.
If you are truly concerned about page ranking within search results as these changes take place, Marcus hit the nail on the head when he says:
This is also why great content, and tons of it, worded in a way that searchers and consumers can actually understand it, is the future of search engine results (SERPs). Like the Google quote said, they’re looking for “ in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
To me, this also is another haiku for inbound marketing—The concept of giving so much great content (be it blog articles, free reports, white papers, case studies, videos, etc) to consumers that you (or your company) become the source of education that every consumer is looking for—and thus makes Google dang happy.
For some other ideas about this topic, I suggest reading Jonathan Leger’s Google vs Content Farms, Steve Scott’s Holy Shit! The Sky is Falling, or TechCrunch’s Google’s Wizard of Oz Search Algorithm and the Threat of Facebook Search.
