Tag Archive for: Google Search

A lead Google spokesperson gave a surprising response to claims that the search engine stole content from a publisher without providing any benefit to the publisher’s website. 

Google’s rich search results have been controversial since their launch, as some feel that these results simply copy information from other websites instead of sending users to that content where it was originally posted. 

The search engine has largely ignored these criticisms by saying that rich results improve the search experience and include links to the original content. 

That’s what makes it so surprising that Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan recently publicly responded to one publisher’s complaints directly.

The Original Complaint

In several recent tweets, a representative for travel brand Travel Lemming posted:

“Google is now stealing Travel Lemming’s own brand searches (even via site search).

They take our list — INCLUDING MY ORIGINAL PHOTOS 📸 — and present it in a rich result so people don’t click through.

I am literally IN that Red Rocks photo!…”

They are doing this across all travel searches – unbranded and branded alike.

Example: “Mexico Travel Tips” – they have an AI answer & also a rich result that basically just re-creates an entire blog post, including our stolen photos.

Again, I am IN that Mexico packing photo!

Like how is it legal for Google to just essentially create entire blog posts from creators’ content and images?

I literally have a law degree from the top law school in the world, and even I can’t figure it out!

Fair use does NOT apply if you’re using the content to compete directly against the creator, which they clearly are.

I can’t sit outside a movie theatre, project the movie on a wall, earn money from it, and claim fair use.

I spent SO much time taking those photos in Denver.

It was 10+ full days worth of work for me and partner Clara, going around the city to photograph everything. $100s of money spent in attraction admission fees, gas, parking.

Now Google just gets to extract all that value?

How much does Google get to take before creators say “enough is enough”?

How hard does the water have to boil before the frog jumps?

The comments show it is a prisoner’s dilemma as long as Google has a monopoly on search …”

Google’s Response

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, provided a lengthy response that delves specifically into what is happening, why, and ways they are hoping to improve the situation. 

Not only does Sullivan give insight into the company’s perspective, but also their own opinions about the function. Importantly, Sullivan doesn’t disregard Travel Lemming’s complaints and is sympathetic to how rich search results impact publishers:

“Hey Nate, this got flagged to my attention. I’ll pass along the feedback to the team. Pretty sure this isn’t a new feature. Elsewhere in the thread, you talk about it being an AI answer, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, either. It’s a way to refine an initial query and browse into more results.

With the example you point out, when you expand the listing, your image is there with a credit. If you click, a preview with a larger view comes up, and that lets people visit the site. Personally, I’m not a fan of the preview-to-click.

I think it should click directly to the site (feedback I’ve shared internally before, and I’ll do this again). But it’s making use of how Google Images operates, where there’s a larger preview that helps people decide if an image is relevant to their search query. Your site is also listed there, too. Click on that, people get to your site.”

If you don’t want your images to appear in Google Search, this explains how to block them:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/prevent-images-on-your-page

I suspect you’d prefer an option to not have them appear as thumbnails in particular features. We don’t have that type of granular control, but I’ll also pass the feedback on. 

I appreciate your thoughts and concerns. I do. The intention overall is to make search better, which includes ensuring people do indeed continue to the open web — because we know for us to thrive, the open web needs to thrive.

But I can also appreciate that this might not seem obvious from how some of the features display.

I’m going to be sharing these concerns with the search team, because they’re important.

You and other creators that are producing good content (and when you’re ranking in the top results, that’s us saying it’s good content) should feel we are supporting you.

We need to look at how what we say and how our features operate ensure you feel that way.

I’ll be including your response as part of this.”

I doubt Sullivan is going to change many minds about Google’s rich search results, but this rare interaction is revealing to how Google sees the situation and is trying to walk a tightrope between providing a seamless search experience while sustaining the sites it relies on.

Google has released its annual Year in Search list of trends and popular searches, but this year’s list includes a special twist.

To celebrate 25 years as a search engine, this year’s Year In Search includes a ton of interesting fun facts, milestones, and a time capsule that helps users see how far we’ve come.

25 Years of Digital Search

To open the latest Year in Search report, Google included a film that highlights how our interests and technology have changed in the last two and a half decades.

The video includes all sorts of gigantic accomplishments from popular figures such as Taylor Swift and iconic brands like Pokemon, along with massive social and scientific developments like nuclear fusion, and the increasing acceptance of marriage equality.

The Time Capsule

The Google Trends Time Capsule shows the most popular searches for certain categories from each year.

For example, the graph below lets you see Pokemon’s gradual fall out of the top five card games and eventual return to popularity 17 years later.

You can explore the featured categories, gain a new perspective of the most powerful trends, and even take an interactive quiz to see which year’s search trends were most interesting to you.

Most Searched Playground

Another new part of the Year in Search report is the inclusion of an interactive Google Doodle/game that highlights many of the most popular places, people, and events from the past 25 years.

Zoom in and explore to find over 1,700 figures, easter eggs, and other surprising finds while touring Google’s history as a search engine.

The Year In Search Report

Of course, we have the annual search trends report itself. The Year in Search 2023 report highlights the most popular searches of the past year for several categories. You can explore the global trends that have shaped the world or filter the trends by country.

Local Year In Search

If you are looking for more localized trends, you can also explore the top trends from specific cities in Google’s Local Year in Search.

The section includes trends for each city including entertainment, “near me” searches, and relevant area-specific searches.

Even More

This year’s report includes even more cool trivia and interactive information, including Google Search Milestones, notable Facts About Google, and a statement from CEO Sundar Pichai’s view for Google’s future.

Google is making some big changes to how it ranks results that aim to deliver more personalized search results and increase the prevalence of “first-hand knowledge”.

The search engine announced the changes earlier this month while spotlighting two specific updates that have recently come to users. 

Cathy Edwards, Vice President of Search at Google, says these updates will better connect humans with the topics and content that are most relevant to their interests and needs:

“Search has always been about connecting human curiosity with the incredible expanse of human wisdom on the net. These advancements will help users find the most helpful information just for them, no matter how specific their questions may be. 

Bringing First-Hand Knowledge To The Surface

Google has made adjustments to its ranking algorithm to show more first-person perspectives higher in search results. While the company didn’t tell us exactly how it tweaked the algorithm, Edwards emphasizes that it will help people find new individual experiences, advice, and opinions when searching. 

With this change, the company says it will hopefully show fewer repetitive pieces of content that don’t bring new perspectives or opinions in the first pages of results. 

The announcement says:

“As part of this work, we’ve also rolled out a series of ranking improvements to show more first-person perspectives in results, so it’s easier to find this content across Search.”

Follow Topics For More Curated Results

Google is giving you the ability to curate your own search results by following topics that are important to you. 

By following topics in search results, such as a favorite football team, style of restaurant, or genre of music, you can stay in touch with these topics naturally while you are searching. 

Follows not only impact what you see in typical search results but help highlight important topics in Discover and other areas of Google.

You can see an example of how this can shape your search results below. The first image shows what search results looked like before this update rolled out, and after.

Like most changes to the search results, however, it is unclear exactly how this affects optimization strategies going forward. We will know more as we get more data in the coming weeks.

Personalization Is The Future

Google has been increasingly customizing search results for users based on numerous factors including location, age, gender, demographics, and more. These latest updates continue this effort to ensure that the search results you see aren’t just the most relevant sites for anyone. They are the most relevant search results for you.

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, raised some eyebrows over the weekend by saying that “major changes” are coming to Google’s search results. 

The statement came during a live talk, where Sullivan reportedly told the crowd to “buckle up” because major changes were on the way.

As the public voice for Google’s Search team, Sullivan is uniquely positioned to speak on what the search engine’s developers are working on behind the scenes. For businesses, this means that he is one of the only people who can give advance notice about upcoming shifts to search results that could impact your online visibility and sales. 

What Did Sullivan Say?

Since it wasn’t livestreamed or recorded, there’s been some discussion about exactly what Sullivan told the crowd. Posts on X agree on a few details though. 

While attendees agree Sullivan specifically used the phrase “buckle up”, a few users provided longer versions of the quote that paint a slightly different picture. 

One person, Andy Simpson, says the entire quote was “There’s so much coming that I don’t want to say to buckle up because that makes you freak out because if you’re doing good stuff, it’s not going to be an issue for you.”

This is likely the case, as Sullivan has since clarified:

“I was talking about various things people have raised where they want to see our results improve, or where they think ‘sure, you fixed this but what about….’ And that these things all correspond to improvements we have in the works. That there’s so much coming that I don’t want to say buckle up, because those who are making good, people-first content should be fine. But that said, there’s a lot of improvements on the way.”

Either way, it is important for businesses to take note of these statements and watch their site’s search results performance for any signs of major shifts in the near future. 

Think using blogs to get to the top of the search engines is a thing of the past? Don’t be so quick to ditch your brand’s blog because a new study suggests that blog posts are the most common type of content found in the top 5 Google search results (excluding homepages). 

Even with low-quality AI-generated blog content on the rise, BrightEdge says that blogs are the leading type of content returned by Google – a strong indication that blogs with well-crafted content are one of the strongest search engine optimization tools available to brands today. 

About The Study

For the study, BrightEdge analyzed results for a dataset of 10,000 keywords of varying intent across 10 specific industries:

  • Banking
  • Insurance
  • Retail
  • Software
  • Higher Education
  • Real Estate
  • Advertising and Marketing
  • Manufacturing
  • Travel and Hospitality
  • Industrial

Using data collected during August of this year, the study then analyzed the content types of 23,785 pages ranking in the top 10 search positions. 

While the leading type of page found in the top search results were homepages, these were excluded because these are essentially the default type of page Google returns when it believes a site may be relevant but it does not know which specific page to recommend.

Once homepages have been accounted for and excluded, the leading type of content in top search results was blog posts – accounting for 19% of the top 10 search results. When you narrow the focus to just the top 5 search results, that climbs to 23% of search results. 

The Takeaway

Many brands have been moving away from traditional brand blogs because of a misguided notion that blogs were becoming irrelevant compared to more interactive or visual media like videos or user-generated content. This trend has only accelerated with the recent surge in lower-quality content pumped out by generative AI systems. 

As Jim Yu, founder of BrightEdge and executive chairman says, however, well-maintained blogs are still an essential tool for raising the visibility of your brand and educating consumers:

“The future is not just AI – it’s AI and human symbiosis. AI can inform and assist, but human creativity, expertise and skill sets are necessary to add the voice and trust of your brand. Success lies in the fusion of AI and human expertise throughout any content creation process,” 

Brands struggling to make progress in this area should likely re-evaluate their content and ensure their strategy is focused on delivering relevant, useful, and interesting information to your target market. 

After months of rumors and speculation, Google’s AI-powered generative search experience is here – sort of. 

The new conversational search tool is available to users as a Google Labs experiment only accessible by signing up for a waitlist. That means it is not replacing the current version of Google Search (at least, not yet), but it is the first public look at what is likely to be the biggest overhaul to Google Search in decades. 

Though we at TMO have been unable to get our hands on the new search experience directly, we have gathered all the most important details from those who have to show you what to expect when the generative search experience becomes more widely available. 

What The AI-Powered Google Generative Search Experience Looks Like

The new Google search experience is present at the very top of Google search results, giving context, answering basic questions, and providing a conversational way to refine your search for better results. 

Notably, any AI-generated search information is currently tagged with a label that reads Generative AI is experimental.

Google will also subtly shade AI content based on specific searches to “reflect specific journey types and the query intent itself.” For example, the AI-created search results in the shopping-related search below are placed on a light blue background. 

Where Does The Information Come From?

Unlike most current AI-powered tools, Google’s new search experience cites its sources. 

Sources are mentioned and linked to, making it easier for users to keep digging. 

Additionally, the AI tools can pull from Google’s existing search tools and data, such as Google Shopping product listings and more. 

Conversational Search

The biggest change that comes with the new AI-powered search is the ability to follow up queries with follow-ups using context from your previous search. As the announcement explains:

“Context will be carried over from question to question, to help you more naturally continue your exploration. You’ll also find helpful jumping-off points to web content and a range of perspectives that you can dig into.”

What AI Won’t Answer

The AI-powered tool will not provide information for a range of topics that might be sensitive or where accuracy is particularly important For example, Google’s AI tools won’t give answers about giving medicine to a child because of the potential risks involved. Similarly, reports suggest the tool won’t answer questions about financial issues.

Additionally, Google’s AI-powered search will not discuss or provide information on topics that may be “potentially harmful, hateful, or explicit”.

To try out the new Google AI-powered generative search experience for yourself sign up for the waitlist here.

To understand and rank websites in search results, Google is constantly using tools called crawlers to find and analyze new or recently updated web pages. What may surprise you is that the search engine actually uses three different types of crawlers depending on the situation with web pages. In fact, some of these crawlers may ignore the rules used to control how these crawlers interact with your site.

In the past week, those in the SEO world were surprised by the reveal that the search engine had begun using a new crawler called the GoogleOther crawler to relieve the strain on its main crawlers. Amidst this, I noticed some asking “Google has three different crawlers? I thought it was just Googlebot (the most well-known crawler which has been used by the search engine for over a decade).”  

In reality, the company uses quite a few more than just one crawler and it would take a while to go into exactly what each one does as you can see from the list of them (from Search Engine Roundtable) below: 

However, Google recently updated a help document called “Verifying Googlebot and other Google crawlers” that breaks all these crawlers into three specific groups. 

The Three Types of Google Web Crawlers

Googlebot: The first type of crawler is easily the most well-known and recognized. Googlebots are the tools used to index pages for the company’s main search results. This always observes the rules set out in robots.txt files.

Special-case Crawlers: In some cases, Google will create crawlers for very specific functions, such as AdsBot which assesses web page quality for those running ads on the platform. Depending on the situation, this may include ignoring the rules dictated in a robots.txt file. 

User-triggered Fetchers: When a user does something that requires for the search engine to then verify information (when the Google Site Verifier is triggered by the site owner, for example), Google will use special robots dedicated to these tasks. Because this is initiated by the user to complete a specific process, these crawlers ignore robots.txt rules entirely. 

Why This Matters

Understanding how Google analyzes and processes the web can allow you to optimize your site for the best performance better. Additionally, it is important to identify the crawlers used by Google and ensure they are blocked in analytics tools or they can appear as false visits or impressions.

For more, read the full help article here.

Google has officially launched a new dashboard page dedicated to notifying users about any issues occurring with Google Search.

The dashboard, available at status.search.google.com, will highlight any outages occurring to Google’s search engine, along with problems crawling, indexing, or serving pages to Search.

As the company said

“As we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search – crawling, indexing, and serving.”

Of course, Google’s search engine is one of the most reliable online services around, though outages do occur and other issues do pop up from time to time. 

The announcement goes into further detail:

“This dashboard reports widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with some details and the current status of the incident. A widespread issue means there’s a systemic problem with a Search system affecting a large number of sites or Search users. Typically these kinds of issues are very visible externally, and internally the SREs’ monitoring and alerting mechanisms are working behind the scenes to flag the issues.”

“Once we confirm with SREs that there’s an ongoing, widespread issue in Search, we aim to post an incident on the dashboard within an hour, and consecutive updates to the incident within 12 hours. Unlike with a traditional automated dashboard, our global staff reports these updates. The start time of the incident is generally when we managed to confirm the issue.”

Most importantly, you will now be able to immediately identify if sudden drops in traffic or other problems are related to your site or Google’s systems. In the past, the only way to confirm any ongoing problems with Google’s search engines was to contact the company directly.

It’s time for Google’s annual report of the top search trends of the past year and this year’s list is a little different.

Along with the usual list of top queries from the U.S. and around the world, the latest search trends report lets you refine the search to see what the most popular search trends were in your local area.

By entering a US city or zip code, Google will filter the results to show the top search trends from that area. You can also view these details by clicking on a specific city on the map.

These local search trends include the top 10 search queries along with notes on anything unique in the city’s search behavior. 

First, let’s go over the biggest search trends from across the country, then we will get to Tulsa’s top search trends further down below:

Google’s Year in Search 2022

Top US Searches of 2022

  1. Wordle
  2. Election results
  3. Betty White
  4. Queen Elizabeth
  5. Bob Saget
  6. Ukraine
  7. Mega Millions
  8. Powerball numbers
  9. Anne Heche
  10. Jeffrey Dahmer

Top Near Me US Searches of 2022

  1. Gas prices near me
  2. At home COVID test near me
  3. Voting near me
  4. Early voting near me
  5. PCR test near me

Top “How to help” US Searches of 2022

  1. How to help Ukraine?
  2. How to help Ukrainian refugees?
  3. How to help abortion rights?
  4. How to help Ukraine army?
  5. How to help Uvalde?

Top Near Me Searches in Tulsa, OK in 2022

  1. Gas prices near me
  2. Cheap gas near me
  3. At home covid test near me
  4. Temp agencies near me
  5. Primary care physician near me
  6. Loan companies near me
  7. Gyros near me
  8. E85 gas near me
  9. Car shows near me
  10. Concerts near me

Interesting Facts about Tulsa’s Online Searches in 2022

  • Tulsa, OK was one of only 2 places that had gyros as a top trending “near me” search, with the other being Lincoln, NE.
  • Tulsa, OK was the only place in the US that had husky-corgi mixes as the top trending animal
  • The top trending recipe search for the Tulsa area was for making quick pancakes.
  • Tulsa searched for country music more than any other genre.

For more, explore Google’s Global Year in Search and Local Year In Search.

Google has confirmed it is finally bringing near-endless scrolling to its desktop search results. Not only will this make the desktop search experience more similar to the mobile search experience, it will also make users more likely to see and engage with more search results. 

The new continuous search experience is currently rolling out for desktop search results in the United States and is likely to be expanded to other markets in the coming months.

As the search engine confirmed in a statement to Search Engine Journal, this is not quite endless scrolling. Instead after approximately six pages worth of URLs before showing users a prompt allowing them to see “more results.”

“… we’re bringing continuous scrolling to desktop so you can continue to see more helpful search results with fewer clicks. It’s now even easier to get inspired with more information at your fingertips.

“Now, when you scroll down you’ll continue to find relevant results so that you can discover new ideas. When you reach the bottom of a search results page, up to six pages of results will be automatically shown until you see a “More results” button if you wish to continue further.”

While users may like this because it brings a more seamless experience and gives them more options without interruption, this also gives Google more space to include snippets, ads, rich media, and other features without completely crowding out organic search listings.

Brands languishing past the first page of search results will likely see a slight boost in traffic as their visibility increases.

On the technical side of things, very little will be changing. There’s no need to change optimization strategies and this update will not affect reporting in Google Search Console because this tool tracks ranking positions, not what page you appear on.