The SEO industry has always been hard to follow but the last few months/years have seen unprecedented changes to the results being displayed. Ever since universal search catapulted videos and local business listings in front of searchers there has been too many different mediums for most people to understand.
During the last 70 days Google has launched no less than 38 new search products from social search to real time search and each one has a different algorithm and requires different optimisation techniques.
According to The Telegraph & Marissa Mayer the next big breakout area for Google is going to be language.
“Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites,” she says. “And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.â€
Right now if you type a search query into Google in English, the servers crawl only English-language sites and deliver only English-language results. But this will change and Google are working on it.
Google has done some stupid things over the last few years but auto translating a query and then displaying auto translated copy back to users is probably the worst idea I have ever heard.
People say that Google is clever at adding these listings but the truth is they are doing it so badly its laughable.
Local listings rely on IP targeting which simply doesn’t work in the UK because of the way BT handles IP addresses. Google knows this and still displays the results.
They also pay no attention at all to click data in universal search results – I have never clicked a YouTube listing in the search results in my life and yet they still display for the majority of things I search for. Why?
Real time search is a joke as well, when I search for something why would a twitter status update from somebody I don’t know be useful? Why are Google not looking at things like trust and relevancy here?
As for their customer support take a look at the maps forum and see hundreds of poor business owners trying to fix their broken listings with no response from Google.
I’m a big fan of Google but to see them making such a mess of everything they do in the UK at the moment is unbelievably frustrating.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Totally agree on quality standards. Google made its name on one thing that worked well. How many new half ass products does it take to ruin a company’s one golden egg?
All I know is they’re making Bing/M$’s job way easier than it needs to be.
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Thanks for the post Patrick but i see that Google has recently launch its new real time search, so there are some disputes in the initial stage, let Google read your post and work to improve its new real time search for UK.
More comments from tag44This was an insightful read on how Google handles its search data, and seeing that some users are so frustrated is a real eye opener. The whole issue of Google translating websites for search results does seem a bit odd, as the majority of the world only speak a single language. If you are now to search for certain terms and get results in other languages I believe the end users will become increasingly frustrated with useless results that they cannot understand (as we all know the auto translated sites will not make perfect sense).
As for the issue of social media statuses appearing in search results I can totally understand the frustration with this, as I have experienced this issue first hand. Why anyone would want to see Twitter updates in a general search is beyond me, and I am very surprised that Google have opted to choose this.
It seems there is quite a bit of frustration with how Google is operating at present, lets hope 2010 brings more stability and a better approach to the current issues.
Hi Patrick – absolutely, positively couldn’t agree more with you on this one. Regarding Real Time Search – my first experience of this came after searching for ‘Tesco’, at which point I was faced with a search engine results page with a Twitterer telling me that he had just eaten a Turkey sandwich from Tesco (and a bag of Doritos no less). However much I love Google, I don’t understand why that makes my searching experience any better. Giving such a visible platform to a random Twitterer isn’t harnessing social media or real time search at all. There are dozens of better ways to integrate social and real time search into search listings and it’s disappointing to see Google get this so wrong.
AP
I disagree, I am a php programmer and would find auto translated search results very helpful. A lot of solutions to problems in the past I have found by using google’s translate on a web page.
everyone just uses google to search for a song name, then click through to the youtube link, Ive seen a lot of normal users using this feature.
Also with the youtube results it’s useful to me in party situations I use it
I have to comment on the twitter thing too, because, although I’m not an avid user myself, I have used it in the past (specifically, when gmail went down) to confirm it wasn’t just a problem on my end, the real time results were very useful because so many people were tweeting about the outage. I think this could happen with live events too such as sporting, and also with natural disasters etc. You can get real information (taken with a grain of salt) from people at that location at that time, rather than waiting for news coverage from your favorite news website, which of course you can still do.
I can’t help think that higher than top 3 for some phrases will not be profitable. I was looking at the live search for lighting last week and 10th position on PPC was more visible than 4th organic position.
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I too am getting increasingly annoyed and frustrated at all these new things Google is throwing at us. If I search for something, I also don’t need to see videos and tweets, and my local search results show companies in Sydney, while I am 600km further north in Australia.
It almost seems like Google wants businesses to spend money on Adwords because with all these additions and distractions, it’s becoming terribly difficult to get a page 1 organic ranking if a company has even the slightest competition.
I predict that a lot more people will start trying out, if not switching permanently to, Bing in 2010, myself included. Bing’s search engine results pages look so neat and clean compared to Google’s!
More comments from Micky StuivenbergIt wasn’t that long ago that Google said they planned to slow down on innovation and acquisition and focus on their offerings.
No doubt, Google has this greatest capability to create relevance on searches yet with so many new things coming out through this search engine, sometimes Google getting out of control of also defining how distracted vision affects the searches. Maybe what Google targets now is how people will be spoon fed with information that they don’t need to navigate each page too far because all are set in one place.
Yes, it’s amazing the poor quality that is released. I was taught that “either it’s worth doing right, or it’s not worth doing at all”.
Oh, you people are missing one thing. Google is a business company. Its purpose is served whether a product is fully baked or half baked, it matters not much if the business is going well.
During the last 70 days Google has launched no less than 38 new search products from social search to real time search and each one has a different algorithm and requires different optimisation techniques.
maintaining google position. then in the end of this year must continue to innovate google with competitors.
well have to totally disagree agree with this blog Google are no Microsoft – they have done all the development them self and good for them to keep pushing things forward as for the local search using ip .. it fine in fact spot on, I get great results all the time
i ‘m sure Google has greatest capability and best search engeniring
Those insights are really useful. Imagine Google running a bunch of products, but unfortunately they don’t have the monopoly on everything. Quality standards should be imposed well, so that the users don’t get half cooked products.
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Hello Patrick,
I agree with you on many counts but I also believe that introducing new ideas and molding them to fit into real world scenerios has it’s benefits. Displaying real time results in the SERPs may not be the ideal solution at the moment but eventually real time search will have very useful applications. It’s a very new concept at the moment.
On a side note: Can you give some details on what you mean by “the way BT handles IP addresses”. BT is a major ISP here in the UK but I havent been able to find anything related on how they handle IP addresses that causes errors in local search.
Many thanks,
pksynths
It’s not just some of Google’s new products that it’s doing badly – some of its exiting offerings are horribly flawed as well.
For example, go to ‘Search settings’ in the upper-right hand corner of Google.com or Google.co.uk’s main screen. Check ‘Use strict filtering (Filter both explicit text and explicit images)’ and then ‘Save Preferences’. This turns on Google’s SafeSearch feature, which they say block “web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results.”
Now go to the main search bar and type in “how to give” and then just wait. Google gives 10 suggested search queries, almost all of which are the names of sex acts.
Select any of them and click ‘Google Search’ – You’ll likely be shown a bunch of results which ‘contain explicit sexual content’. Plus, the ‘Searches related to…’ section at the bottom of the page will also likely be filled with explicit offerings.
This problem isn’t restricted to the phrase ‘how to give’ – type ‘how to sh’ (then just stop and wait for suggested results), or ‘how to st’, or similar.
Google’s spending a lot of time and energy worrying about flu trends and renewable energy and electric cars. Maybe they should be spending more time worrying about whether their basic features work as described.
Thanks for the post Patrick
Google is keeping everyone who does web design or SEO on their toes this year!
Thanks for this post. Very interesting.
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