[Build Backlinks Online] The Shape of Things to Come: Google in 2014

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Shape of Things to Come:
Google in 2014'

Posted by gfiorelli1
We can't imagine the future without first understanding the past.


In this post, I will present what I consider the most relevant events we
experienced this year in search, and will try to paint a picture of things to
come by answering this question: How will Google evolve now that it has acquired
Wavii, Behav.io, PostRank, and Grapple, along with machine learning and neural
computing technology?


The future of Google will be based on entity search, semantic search, and
¼ber-personalization, and all the technologies it acquired will interact
with one another in order to shape the Google we will experience in 2014. I'll
show you how to deal with it.

The past

Last year, in my "preview" post The Cassandra Memorandum, besides presenting
my predictions on what would have been the search marketing landscape during
this 2013, I presented a funny prophecy from a friend of mine: the "Balrog
Update," an algorithm that, wrapped in fire, would have crawled the web,
penalizing and incinerating sites which do not include the anchor text "click
here" at least seven times and do not include a picture of a kitten asleep in a
basket.


Thinking back, though, that hilarious preview wasn't incorrect at all.


In the past three years, we've had all sorts of updates from Google: Panda,
Penguin, Venice, Top-Heavy, EMD, (Not Provided) and Hummingbird (and that's just
its organic search facet).


Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and other inbound marketing outlets also had their
share of meaningful updates.


For many SEOs (and not just for them), organic search especially has become a
sort of Land of Mordor...






For this reason, and because I see so often in the Q&A, in tweets sent to me,
or in requests for help popping up in my inbox, how many SEOs feel discouraged
in their daily work by all these frenzied changes, before presenting my vision
of what we need to expect in Search in 2014, I thought it was better to have our
own war speech.


Somehow we need it:






(Clip from the "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" by Peter
Jackson, distributed by Warner Bros)

A day may come when the courage of SEOs fails. But it is not this day.
A methodology




"I give you the light of Earendil ... May it be a light for you in dark
places,
when all other lights go out."

Even if I'm interested in large-scale correlation tests like the Moz Search
Engine Ranking Factors, in reality I am convinced that the science in which we
best excel is that of hindsight.


For example, when Caffeine was introduced, almost no one imagined that that
magnification of the SERPs would have meant its deterioration too.


Probably not even Google had calculated the side effects of that epochal
infrastructural change, and only the obvious decline in the quality of the SERPs
(who remembers this post by Rand) led to Panda, Penguin, and EMD.


But we understood just after they rolled out that Panda and Co. were needed
consequences of Caffeine (and of spammers' greed).


And despite my thinking that every technical marketer (as SEOs and social
media marketers are) should devote part of their time to conducting experiments
that test their theories, actually the best science we tend to apply is the
science of inference.


AuthorRank is a good example of that. Give us a Patent, give us some new
mark-up and new social-based user profiling, and we will create a new theory
from scratch that may include some fundamentals but is not proven by the facts.


Hindsight and deduction, however, are not to blame. On the contrary; if
done wisely, reading into the news (albeit avoiding paranoid theories) can help
us perceive with some degree of accuracy what the future of our industry may be,
and can prepare us for the changes that will come.

While we were distracted...

While we were distractedâfirst by the increasingly spammy nature of
Google and, secondly, by the updates Google rolled out to fight those same
spammy SERPsâBig G was silently working on its evolution.


Our (justified) obsession with the Google zoo made us underestimate what
were actually the most relevant Google "updates:" the Knowledge Graph, Google
Now, and MyAnswers.


The firstâwhich has become a sort of new obsession for us
SEOsâwas telling us that Google didn't need an explicit query for showing
us relevant information, and even more importantly, that people could stay
inside Google to find that information.


The second was a clear declaration of which field Google is focusing its
complete interest on: mobile.


The third, MyAnswers, tells us that Personalizationâor, better,
¼ber-personalizationâis the present and future of Google.


MyAnswers, recently rolled out in the regional Googles, is a good example
of just how much we were distracted. Tell me: How many of you still talk about
SPYW? And how many of you know that its page now redirects to the MyAnswers one?
Try it: www.google.com/insidesearch/features/plus/â.

What about Hummingbird?

Yes, Hummingbird, the update no SEO noticed was rolled out.


Hummingbird, as I described in my latest post here on Moz, is an
infrastructural update that essentially governs how Google understands a query,
applying to all the existing "ranking factors" (sigh) that draw the SERPs.


From the very few things we know, it is based over the synonym dictionaries
Google was already using, but applies a concept based analysis over them where
entities (both named and search) and "word coupling" play a very important role.


But, still, Google is attending primary school and must learn a lot, for
instance not confusing Spain with France when analyzing the word "tapas" (or
Italy with the USA for "pizza"):




But we also know that Google has bought DNNresearch Inc. and its deep
neural networks, which had gained great experience in machine learning with
Panda, and that people like Andrew Ng moved from the Google X team to the
Knowledge Team (the same of Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts), so it is quite
probable that Google will be a very disciplined student and will learn very
fast.

The missing pieces of the "future" puzzle

As with any other infrastructural change, Hummingbird will lead to visible
changes. Some might already be here (the turmoil in the Local Search as
described by David Mihm), but the most interesting ones are still to come.


Do you want to know what they are? Then watch and listen to what Oren
Etzioni of Wavii (bought by Google last April 2013) says in this video:






As well described by Bill Slawski here:


The [open information] extraction approach identifies nouns and how they
might be related to each other by the verbs that create a relationship between
them, and rates the quality of those relationships. A âclassifierâ
determines how trustworthy each relationship might be, and retains only the
trustworthy relationships.


These terms within these relationships (each considered a
âtupleâ) are stored in an inverted index that can be used to respond
to queries.


So, it can improve the usage of the immense Knowledge Base of Google, along
with the predictive answers to queries based on context. Doesn't all this remind
you what we already see in the SERPs?


Moreover, do you see the connection with Hummingbird and how it can link
together the Knowledge Graph, Google Now, and MyAnswers; and ultimately also
determine how classic organic results (and ads) will be shown to the users over
a pure entity-based and semantic analysis, where links will still play a role,
but not be so overly determinant?


So, if I have to preview the news that will shake our industry in 2014, I
would look to the path Wavii has shown us, but also especially to the solutions
that Google finds for answering the questions Etzioni himself was presenting in
the video above as the challenges Wavii still needed to solve.


But another acquisition may hide the key to those questions: the team from
Behav.io.


I say team, because Google did not buy Behav.io as a society, but the
entire team, which became part of the Google Now area.


What was the objective of Behav.io? It was looking at how peoplesâ
locations, networks of phone contacts, physical proximity, and movement
throughout the day could help in predicting a range of behaviors.


More over, Behav.io was based over the smart analysis of the all the data
the sensors in our smartphones could tell about us. Not only GPS data (have you
ever looked at your Location History?), but also the speakers/microphones, the
proximity detection between two or more sensors, which apps we use and which we
download and discard, the lighting sensors, browser history (no matter which
search engines we use), the accelerometer, SMS...




You can imagine how Google could use all this information: Again, for
enhancing the predictive solution of any query that could matter to us. The
repercussions of this technology will be obvious for Google Now, but also for
MyAnswers, which substantially is very similar to Google Now in its purposes.


The ability to understand app usage could allow Google to create an
interest graph for each one of us, which could enhance the "simple"
personalization offered by our web history. For instance, I usually read the
news directly from the official apps of the newspapers and magazines I like, not
from Google News or a browser. I also read 70% of the posts I'm interested in
from my Feedly app. All that information would normally not be accessible by
Google, but now that it owns the Behav.io technology, it could access it.


But the Behav.io technology could also be very important for helping Google
understand what the real social graph of every single person is. The social
graph is not just the connection between profiles in Facebook or Twitter or
Google Plus or any other social network, nor is it the sum of all the
connections of every social network. The "real life social graph" (this
definition is mine) is also composed of the relations between people that we
don't have in our circles/followers/fans, people we contact only by phone, short
text messages or WhatsApp.


Finally, we should remember that back in 2011 Google acquired two other
interesting startups: PostRank and Social Grapple. It is quite sure that Google
has already used their technology, especially for Google Plus Analytics, but I
have the feeling that it (or its evolution) will be used to analyze the quality
of the connections we have in our own "real life social graph," hence helping
Google distinguish who our real influencers are, and therefore to personalize
our searches in any facet (predictive or not predictive).




Image credit: Niemanlab.org


Another aspect that we probably will see introduced once and for all will
be sentiment analysis as a pre-rendering phase of the SERPs (something that
Google could easily do with the science behind its Prediction API). Sentiment
Analysis is needed, not just because it could help distinguishing between
documents that are appreciated by its users and those that are not. If we agree
that semantic search is key in Hummingbird; if we agree that Semantic is not
just about the triptych subject, verb, and object; and if we agree that natural
language understanding is becoming essential for Google due to Voice Search,
then sentiment analysis is needed in order to understand rhetoric figures (i.e.
the use of metaphors and allegories) and emotional inflections of the voice (the
ironic and sarcastic tones, for instance).


Maybe it is also for these reasons that Google is so interested in buying
companies like Boston Dynamics? No, I am not thinking of Skynet; I am thinking
of HAL 9000, which could be the ideal objective of Google in the years to come,
even more so than the often-cited "Star Trek Computer."

What about us?

Sincerely, I don't think that our daily lives as SEOs and inbound marketers
will radically change in 2014 from what they are now.


Websites will still need to be crawled, parsed, and indexed; hence
technical SEO will still maintain a huge role in the future.


Maybe from a technical point of view, those ones who still have not
embraced structured data will need to do so, even though structured data by
itself is not enough to say that we are doing semantic SEO.


Updates like Panda and Penguin will still be rolled out, with Penguin
possibly introduced as a layer in the Link Graph in order to automate it, as it
happens now with Panda.


And Matt Cutts will still announce to us that some link network has been
"retired."


What I can predict with some sort of clarityâand for the simple
reason that people and not search engines definitely are our targetsâis
that real audience analysis and cohort analysis, not just keywords and
competitor research, will become even more important as SEO tasks.


But if we already were putting people at the center of our jobsâif we
already were considering SEO as Search Experience Optimizationâthen we
won't change the they we work that much.


We will still create digital assets that will help our sites be considered
useful by the users, and we will organize our jobs in synergy with social,
content, and email marketing in order to earn the status of thought leaders in
our niche, and in doing so will enter into the "real life social graph" of our
audience members, hence being visible in their private SERPs.


The future I painted is telling us that is the route to follow. The only
thing it is urging us to do better is integrate our internet marketing strategy
with our "offline" marketing strategy, because that distinction makes no sense
anymore for the users, nor does it make sense to our clients. Because marketing,
not just analytics, is universal.





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