[Build Backlinks Online] I Think I Might Have Been Wrong About Voice Search

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'I Think I Might Have Been Wrong
About Voice Search'


Posted by willcritchlow
I roundly mocked voice search for such a long time.
I mocked it in public:



And I argued internally at Distilled against it being an important trend.
But I think I might have been wrong.
Before I explain why I think I might have been wrong, I want to give you a few
of bits of information in my defence:


I don't drive much, and almost never on my own;I commute on the train and most
of my driving is with my family.
I work in an open-plan office without so much as a cubicle to shield my
embarrassing experiments with voice search from the world.
I actually don't like using the phone much, so it may have passed me by that
talking into that small device is a perfectly acceptable thing that normal
people do.

My main arguments why voice search wasn't an important trend were:
1. You look stupid talking into your phone
In hindsight, perhaps this was the most shortsighted of all my arguments. Of
course we don't always look entirely sensible holding a bit of technology up to
our ears, but it seems like we have made it socially acceptable in most
environments.



Image courtesy of travosaurus
More importantly, I think that I underestimated the speed with which things can
become socially normal. I'm personally more up for trying this kind of new thing
than most, and I think I underestimated everyone else's willingness to try new
things.



I increasingly make calls on my computer. Between Google+ Hangouts, Skype, and
GoToMeeting, I probably average 2-3/day, so even in my cubicle-less existence
it's becoming more and more normal for me to talk to my computer.
2. You can't edit things easily
Anyone who tried early voice dictation software is familiar with the process of
trying to get it to recognise stop words and having it write out what you said:


"Delete word back. DELETE WORD BACK. Screw it."





My imagined future of voice search had all kinds of similar problems. While some
people are reporting that third parties can activate Google Glass, I imagine
that is just teething difficulties.
There are two big things that give me hope for the future of voice search in
terms of query editing:
(a) So much context is going with each query
You only have to look at Google Now to realise how far this has come:



You know that when they are capable of returning results for things you haven't
even searched for yet (see Danny's write-up), they must be doing a lot of
enhancement of queries with implicit data even when you are explicitly
searching. Here's how we've been thinking about it at Distilled:



All of this gives Google ever-increasing ability to get the query right by
appending context and other information to it.
(b) Conversational search is amazing
Of all the many things that should impress me (like Google's ability to return
results for a never-seen-before query in a fraction of a second), conversational
search is perhaps one of the more gimmicky in its current incarnation.
We've long had results that shifted in response to previous queriesbut it's new
that you are able to explicitly reference previous queries. It's amazing how
slick this is (when it works) and it feels futuristic to be able to ask your
computer:


"How old is Barack Obama?"
"How tall is he?"
"Who is his wife?"
"How old is she?"

Or to ask for the time in multiple time zones:





All of this makes me think that query correction may not be needed too much, and
when it is, it may not be too much of a problem. It's already quicker than
typing for relatively easily spoken mid-length queries.
3. It doesn't matter anyway â they're just queries

I honestly hadn't thought too much about the marketing implications, because I
figured that not only was voice search not going to catch on, but that even if
it did, it would make no practical difference to us as marketers. I figured the
way it would work would be something like:
Voice --> text --> query --> result
In actuality, the clumsiness of voice input appears to be a driving force behind
Google relying less on the query itself and more on the implicit andexplicit
input from the user.
I wonder if we should have seen this coming, with "(not provided)" foreboding
the death of the keyword? I had interpreted the statements from Googlers about
"the death of the number one ranking" as being all about naive personalisation
(location, search history, etc.). In fact, it appears that they are talking
about the capability to process a whole load of new implicit inputs, including
things like:


Device
Current activity
Daily routine
Interests
Significant places
Social network
Calendar entries
Gmail information (flight confirmations, etc.)

Voice search is a powerful driver towards queryless search and (more
importantly, I think) query-enhanced search, where sparse input information is
combined with ambient and personal information to return the results youneed
right now.


Is voice search the future, then?
I think it's part ofthe future. I don't see it cannibalising much of desktop
search, where I imagine it'll remain a novelty or an add-on, and I expect much
of the its application to mobile search is incremental on top of more complex
written queries.
The more important part in my mind is the impact of the technology it takes to
power voice search. The fact that Google canroll out voice search this effective
speaks not only to their natural language processing ability but also to the
maturity of their ability to understandthe web.
What should we do as marketers?
As web marketers, we need to realise that the dumb robot we've been considering
all these years is rapidly becoming smarter. I think the actions for marketers
have far less to do with voice search itself than with a real understanding of
the underlying technology.
If you haven't seen this video (I found it via Justin), I highly recommend
taking the time to watch at least the first half hour (up to the Q&A):

...and that's from over two years ago. It's quite stunning how far Google's
understanding of the web has come, and technologies like Google Now are
highlighting ability to put it all together.
The biggest actionsI would recommend are therefore to prioritise all the things
that help Google understand rather than just indexyour site. That means things
like:


Authorship information
Structured markup (and structured data)
Accurate meta information for objects and pages
Machine-readable feeds of anything they consume (location data, prices, new
content)

Conceptually, I think we need to change our mindset around keywords. "(not
provided)" isn't the only thing taking away query information; queries will
increasingly be composed largely of implicit information alongside the explicit
query.
Even if "(not provided)" rolled back (some chance!), we would still be left with
less and less information to explain why and how a particular visitor arrived on
our site and why we ranked for them. I see analytics and reporting moving
towards a content- and user-centric model (across repeat visits and across
devices), and moving away from a transactional, session-based view of keywords.
You can set yourself up for future success by moving towards content-centric
metrics now, and by implementing user-centric tracking with your analytics
platform of choice (or waiting for it to come to universal analytics).

I'm looking forward to some disagreement in the comments, but remember: there's
a lot ofscience left to come.





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