Google is changing, are you?

02 September 2010

Google is heading into stormy seas, with revenue from search growth starting to slow, Apple thinking of building a search engine, Microsoft on the prowl and Facebook with 500 million users.

Undaunted it has a plan focused around trust, intent and locality. Let's take a walk down each path and see how they converge.

Firstly, trust. It has been a big part of the Google algorithm for years but it's grown in its impact very recently. Whether a site is trusted is critical to Google, first in the respect of it being "honest" (ie not trying to con the algorithm) and recently, we believe, trusted by real human beings.

Going back a year a search for "digital cameras" yielded a bunch of content rich sites where the common denominator was that "digital camera" was a core part of the domain name.  The same search now yields a very different set of results, sites that are focused on digital cameras but are trusted brands like Panasonic, Amazon, Jessops and Moneysupermarket.

My start-up is currently engaged in trying to work out how they measure human trust but it's likely to be a combination of traffic, brand mentions and sentiment cooked up with some artificial intelligence.

Intent is something Google is very interested in. It wants to know your intent so that their answers to your questions are better. A simple example is this, you're downtown at 12.30pm and you type "sushi" into Google maps on your iPhone, by examining the time and nature of the search it's pretty obvious you want to eat sushi, so Google shows you ads for local sushi houses. Google knows where you've been and where you’re going and can use that information to display personalized search results based on intent.

Think of your iPhone or Android phone as being a physical cookie that Google can geo locate and then the game changes again when mobile devices get new RFID chips, which can make tracking even more efficient.

Economically Google is very interested in local retail, there’s huge advertising expenditure at the street level and Google is currently only seeing a small amount of it. GPS and Google map enabled smart phones allow Google to not only help you make a local purchase decision but also make serendipitous discoveries. If you have previously visited, say a car museum, Google will highlight that on the handheld map.

How does this all converge? Think of Tom Cruise in Minority Report; remember the personalised advertising as he was running down the mall? That’s where I predict Google will be.

From an SEO perspective what would I be doing? Proactively building links with trusted relevant sites....

John Straw, Managing director and founder, InfluenceFinder