The following are notes from last night’s event. These are not final text, just merely notes to inform those who were not able to join the “sold-out” crowd (event was free with tasty eats provided by Google) or a refresher for those who were.
SEMPO Boston Hosts Google Universal Search @ Google, Cambridge MA 4/8/09
Speaker: Frances Haugen
Organizing the world’s information with a simple premise: Google will do its best to give the best possible answers
Info takes lots of forms: images, blogs, books
Google seeks to
- Provide comprehensiveness
- Continue to focus on: What is the users’ intent
- Retain relevance
- Run every query against every index
- Show results only after looking @ all the data
- Blend results into single ranked list
What’s next
- Looking to make search more accessible for non-native English-speakers
- Improve relevance
- More parallel searches (When have misspelling, results for corrected also avail)
- Expand more context (multiple refined searches, apply older queries to new ones)
Help users explore
- More variety in result types more often
- One main list w links for refinement
- Keep list quick and easy to read
What does it mean for Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
- Usual guidelines still apply
- Webmasters are central to Google’s mission
SEMs should take advantage of prominent new verticals
- Google video sitemap
- High-quality well-captioned images
- Update local searches
Discussion
Why choose one thing over another?
Google has insights of volume to study the patterns of what people click on
Google has people are trained to evaluate: Is this actually better?
Every time Google launches a ranking refinement: It’s done carefully and remains conscious about what people think is actually better.
Regardless of who generates the answers, Google is committed to making sure best possible answers are provided.
Tip: Regular-expressions.info: search pattern language tool