The UK is one of countries where search is most dominated by Google. It’s been around 20 years and many of its users have no history of ever using much else to carry out their internet searches.
At a small ‘birthday party’ Google revealed their thoughts on the evolution of search over the next 20 years. There were 3 main messages.
SEARCHER JOURNEY
We have already seen Google provide personalised results, if you are logged in, based on your previous searches and consequent website visits. We’ve also heard of Google saying its algorithm is being changed to try to deliver results driven by searcher intent rather than just the words in the search phrase.
Google says that in the future, they will be able to identify where you are in a search / research journey and deliver results that match the stage that you’ve reached. The implication is that Google will provide more and more content itself rather than just pointing to other’s pages.
If this happens, the only thing on the first page of Google search results – apart from Google content – could be adverts. Will Google continue to have 90%+ of the search market in these circumstances?
ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE DRIVEN SEARCH RESULTS
In terms of page content, Google moved about 6 years ago from exact phrase matching to determine a page’s relevance to a search to topic based matching. Now they say that for about 30% of searches the results are driven by what Google calls neural matching.
Ben Gomes, Google’s VP, Search, News and assistant said “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.”
What does this mean for those of us who help companies gain more lead generating website visits from organic search? In my view, the change is more evolutionary than revolutionary – encouraging the production of pages with content that matches the type of searches made by people at each stage of their buying journey.
FINDING INFORMATION VISUALLY
Search Engine Journal said “The Knowledge Graph is an intelligent model that taps into Google’s huge repository of entity and fact-based information and seeks to understand the real-world connections between them. In other words, instead of interpreting every keyword and query literally, Google infers what people are looking for. “
Google is now adding a topic layer that understands how these connections grow over time and change as people get to know more about the topic they’re interested in. This will enable Google to introduce useful new activity tracking / archiving features and to suggested useful additional searches, including sub-topics of what you’re searching for. Google’s ‘Discover’ news feed on mobile – with 500 million users – will also benefit from Knowledge Graph’s Topic Layer.
The latest version of Google’s Lens app can analyze text in photos and it can show you lookalikes of items in the photos. Developments of this is also already having an impact on the features in Google image search results.
Lastly there is the development of AMP (accelerated mobile pages) stories.
Original Source: Yoast