Google is expanding its cloud services, bringing Retail Search to its clients in an effort to help them provide the best experience to their own customers.
One of the biggest issues online shoppers face is finding the products they’re interested in. This can especially be apparent when comparing retail platform search capabilities with the Google Search features customers have become accustomed to.
Google Cloud is now bringing the power of its search to retail clients, with Retail Search, which the company unveiled in a blog.
This fully managed service is easily customizable, enabling organizations to craft shopper-focused search experiences. Our site search solution builds upon decades of Google’s experience and innovation in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Retailers can make product discovery even easier for shoppers, while optimizing for their business goals with advanced capabilities
Retail Search gives clients the ability to offer advanced query understanding, meaning customers will have better success finding what they’re looking for even with the broadest of search terms. The service also includes semantic search, which matches product attributes with relevant products.
Customers are already seeing the benefit of Retail Search.
“With limited customer signals and no historical data, descriptive long-tail searches are some of the most challenging queries to understand,” said Neelima Sharma, senior vice president, technology, e-commerce, marketing and merchandising at Lowe’s. “We have been partnering with Google Cloud to give our customers relevant results for long-tail searches and have seen an increase in click-through and search conversion and a drop in our ‘No Results Found’ rate since we launched.”
Google Cloud customers interested in learning more can visit Discovery Solutions for Retail or contact their Google Cloud field sales representative.
Google is making some major changes to how its search engine operates as the US prepares for the election in November.
Tech companies have come under fire from both sides of the aisle for alternately doing too much and not enough to combat misinformation, false claims and divisive content. Facebook famously got in major trouble over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, resulting in multiple fines and ongoing scrutiny.
It appears Google is already taking measures to avoid any scenarios that could put it in the hot seat, by changing how its Autocomplete algorithm works in the weeks leading to the election.
“We expanded our Autocomplete policies related to elections, and we will remove predictions that could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party,” writes Pandu Nayak Google Fellow and Vice President, Search. “We will also remove predictions that could be interpreted as a claim about participation in the election—like statements about voting methods, requirements, or the status of voting locations—or the integrity or legitimacy of electoral processes, such as the security of the election. What this means in practice is that predictions like ‘you can vote by phone’ as well as ‘you can’t vote by phone,’ or a prediction that says ‘donate to’ any party or candidate, should not appear in Autocomplete. Whether or not a prediction appears, you can still search for whatever you’d like and find results.”
The new feature builds on the company’s policy of excluding hateful and inappropriate results from displaying in Autocomplete. It remains to be seen if these measures will have a noticeable impact.
Google is doubling down on its efforts to make inroads in the retail market, with its latest planned acquisition aimed at helping brick and mortar businesses list their inventory online.
Pointy is a Dublin, Ireland-based tech startup that specializes in helping businesses easily list and manage their inventory online. The company works with retailers throughout Ireland, as well as in nearly every town and city in the U.S.
“With Pointy, merchants simply plug a small box into their barcode scanner or install the Pointy app on their point of sale system, which surfaces the products that they sell directly into the ‘See what’s in store’ section of their business profile on Google Search,” according to Google’s announcement. “Since we introduced this functionality a few years ago, Pointy has been one of our key partners, helping thousands of local merchants display this data within Google. We’re looking forward to working with Pointy to help even more local retailers bring their product inventory online.”
Pointy already has close ties with Google, having partnered with the search giant over the years, and sees the deal as the next logical step.
“When we started Pointy, our mission was to make things better for local retailers,” reads a blog post on Pointy’s site. “That remains our mission today. All of our services continue to operate as usual. We look forward to building even better services in the future, with the backing of Google’s resources and reach.”
“Today is a big step forward for Pointy, but there is still a very long way to go. We’re as excited about the future as when we first started.”
The terms of the deal were not disclosed but, pending the standard approval process, the deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.
Google just announced that it will be using a new type of formatting for how newsgroups present their data in Search results. This will make it easier for users to find the information they need. The move tomake data more accessible is part of the Google News Initiative. The project allows the company to work together with the journalism and news industry to build a stronger and more dynamic future for news.
So far, Google hascollaborated with 30 expert data journalists to develop ways to better present key data. The partnership has resulted in a format well-suited for search results. Users will now see structured data in a tabular form displayed directly in the top search result. The format makes it more readable and easier for users to locate the information they need. It has also made it simpler to add structured data to a website’s existing code.
Google has used indexed data in Search before, but it’s only now that news organizations are included.
ProPublica has already utilized this improved method of showing search results. The news organization’s Deputy Managing Editor, Scott Klein, commented on the enhanced presentation and said the real-world impact news orgs have make it vital that people are given the information they need when they need it.
“If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us,”Klein said. He also added that adding extra code is trivial at best.
Google has been on a mission to improve Chrome, with reports of a makeover or an improved image search function floating around for months now. But changing the format for how data is presented in search results so that it’s comprehensive and easier to understand is the right step to take.
What is and isn’t a ranking factor in search? Here are the latest thoughts by industry experts on search ranking factors and particularly Google Ranking Factors as they are in 2016.
Content & Links Are the Two Most Important Ranking Signals
Eric Enge noted in a post that he participated in a Hangout with Google’s Andrey Lippatsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist, who was asked about the top 3 ranking signals, noting that RankBrain was announced as the third most important. “I can tell you what they are. It’s content and links going into your site,” answered Lippatesev.
“When you aren’t facing page relevance or quality issues, links can, and do, continue to significantly impact rankings.” said Enge.
“Backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor,” said Brian Dean founder of Backlinko in a recent blog post on Google Ranking Factors. “We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.” Read more on the Backlinko Ranking Study at the end of this article.
RankBrain – Third Most Important Factor
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote an interesting piece on how RankBrain has now become the third most important ranking factor behind content and links. According to a report onBackChannel RankBrain is being used on almost ALL search queries helping determine the most relevant results and their order:
Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Jeff Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.” What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is Not a Ranking Factor
“I think we can establish that CTR is not a direct ranking signal for Google. At the same time, it can have an indirect effect,” said Eric Enge in a recent video (below) they posted on their marketing website Stone Temple Consulting. “Lots of people clicking on a certain result might indicate a real interest in it, and that might mean it’s a better result than the result above it. Notice I said might there. That will be important later. Anyway, many people have assumed that search engines like Google would use such a signal, of course, bouncing it off against other signals that it uses in ranking.”
So with that answer, one wonders why isn’t then CTR a ranking signal? Primarily because Google has told us they don’t, commented Enge. He noted that it’s simply too easy to game and that it doesn’t necessarily mean the user was satisfied with the result. Google uses it internally for studying search behavior but it is not a ranking signal. He provided this chart in a recent blog post. Enge wrote another article about CTR as a (non) ranking factor here.
Google Confirms 301, 302, 3xx redirects Do Not Lose PageRank Value
“30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore,” Google’s Gary Illyes said in a tweet yesterday. Eric Enge asked Illyes in a Twitter reply if the redirects are “not even a dampening factor?” Illyes replied, “@stonetemple for PageRank, no.” Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land has more.
Local Business Ranking Factors
2016 Quantitative Local Search Ranking Factors Study: If you want your business to rank better in local search results, focus on building popularity for your business, as the results of the study indicate that business popularity seems to outweigh all other factors, most importantly in the form of reviews and quality backlinks to your site. Google Review and Profile View are by far the two most important local business ranking factors.
Mobile-Friendliness – a Ranking Signal on Mobile Searches
“Last year, we started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches,” said Klemen Kloboves, a software engineer at Google, in a Google Webmaster blog post. “Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.”
“We recently completed a major revision of our rater guidelines to adapt to this mobile world, recognizing that people use search differently when they carry internet-connected devices with them all the time,” saidMimi Underwood, Sr. Program Manager of Google Search Growth & Analysis. “You can find that update here (PDF).”
More Causes for Lower Ranking
Enge also says that there are other factors contributing to less appearance of a site on the first page of a Google search result, which is in effect a lower ranking:
More real estate allocated to paid search
More content from other sources, such as image search, YouTube, and the other factors I mentioned above
Some pages that have less than 10 web results
Portions of the web results that are clearly less driven by links, such as local web, query deserves diversity, and in-depth article results
Backlinko Study
The Backlinko Study is unbelievably helpful in understanding all ranking factors, not just the new ones that happened in 2016. Backlinko analyzed 1 million Google search results to answer the question: Which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings?
Backlinko identified 11 main ranking factors that I’ve summarized below:
Backlinks are still the number one factor in determining search ranking.
Site Authority correlates to ranking.
Tightly focused content ranks better.
Longer content ranks higher.
Sites using HTTPS do better than equal sites using HTTP.
Schema markup doesn’t help.
An image in content raises ranking.
Small correlation with title tag keyword optimization and ranking.
Speed is now a huge ranking signal. It matters a lot.
In a deal with LyricFind, Google is now displaying lyrics in search results starting immediately. LyricFind is the world’s largest lyric licensing service with over 4,000 publishers in its catalog. Lyrics will be seen both in Google’s search results and within Google Play Music.
“We’re happy to expand the depth and quality of lyrics available on Google’s services,” says LyricFind CEO Darryl Ballantyne. “We’re working together to make lyrics available to a larger audience in a faster and more efficient way.”
We're happy to announce our partnership with Google! Through this new deal, LyricFind will add lyrics from 4,000… https://t.co/upKXDG6cZg
LyricFind, founded by Darryl Ballantyne and Mohamed Moutadayne bills itself as “the world’s leader in legal lyric solutions.” The company was founded in 2004.
Billboard spoke to Ballantyne and got this quote indicating that the partnership will generate millions more in royalties to its publishing partners:
“It should be a significant revenue stream,” Ballantyne said. “I can’t get into the rates, but we expect it to be millions of dollars generated for publishers and songwriters as a result of this. It’s all based on usage. Royalties are paid based on the number of times a lyric is viewed. The more it’s viewed, the more publishers get paid.”
Included in the over 4,000 music publishers that LyricFind currently licenses are all the majors – Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing (including EMI Music Publishing), and Kobalt. According to LyricFind, they are also the exclusive third-party lyrics licensor for Universal Music Publishing Group, the world’s largest music publisher.
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote an interesting piece on how RankBrain has now become the third most important ranking factor behind content and links. According to a report on BackChannel RankBrain is being used on almost ALL search queries helping determine the most relevant results and their order:
Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Jeff Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.” What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.
“It was significant to the company that we were successful in making search better with machine learning,” says John Giannandrea. “That caused a lot of people to pay attention.” Pedro Domingos, the University of Washington professor who wrote The Master Algorithm, puts it a different way: “There was always this battle between the retrievers and the machine learning people,” he says. “The machine learners have finally won the battle.”
RankBrain announced in October 2015 in a Bloomberg article and video (below) is a machine learning algorithm that uses big data from billions of search queries, who’s searching, who clicks what, geolocation, etc. to better determine what a user expects to see in the search results.
Google has been very secretive about RankBrain since October but did references it recently in a post on their Google Cloud Platform Blog. The post, by Google Hardware Engineer Norm Jouppi, was about how machine learning is now powering most of Google’s applications including Street View, Inbox Smart Reply, voice search and Google Search. Norm commented about a “stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications.” This “stealthy project” resulted in Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) which is now powering machine learning features at Google.
It’s fascinating how fast Google implements new technology in its applications:
TPU is an example of how fast we turn research into practice — from first tested silicon, the team had them up and running applications at speed in our data centers within 22 days.
TPUs already power many applications at Google, including RankBrain, used to improve the relevancy of search results and Street View, to improve the accuracy and quality of our maps and navigation. AlphaGo was powered by TPUs in the matches against Go world champion, Lee Sedol, enabling it to “think” much faster and look farther ahead between moves.
The first addition is an update to the Top Charts that was unveiled back in May. At the time, Google said that its top charts would show you the top searches by region for categories like actors, animals, sports and more. The new feature – Trending Top Charts – adds the option to see the top trending searches in each category.
As an example, here’s the Top Chart for animals. You can clearly see that dogs are the most searched topic overall in the animal category:
Now, switch over to the Trending Top Chart and you see that sharks are now number one. That doesn’t mean that sharks are getting the most search traffic overall, but rather that sharks saw a spike in searches over the last month compared to normal search traffic:
Finally, Google announced that it will be rolling out some updates to its explore page. This is the part of Google Trends that lets you compare search data between any number of search topics. Here’s all the new stuff coming to the feature:
We’ve shifted refinements for countries, categories, and Google products (like Web Search, YouTube, etc) to the top navigation, making it a more consistent Google experience. We’ve also made it easier to discover power tools to compare countries and time ranges.
Search nerds will no doubt enjoy all the new tools Google’s rolling out for power users, but the rest of us have plenty to enjoy with the updates to Top Charts and Hot Searches.
Do you have a favorite restaurant? Do the people who work there know you by name now? I visit the Panera near work every morning to get a sandwich or pastry and an iced green tea. For the past few months, the lovely young ladies working there have an iced green tea ready for me when I walk in the door. They know me and provide a personal service that has made me want to keep giving them my business. Could airlines ever give service that personal?
British Airways thinks they can and they’re going to invade your privacy to do it. They will equip all of their flight attendants with iPads and task them to search for frequent flyers on Google as part of a new program called “Know Me.” These attendants will then collect all the information they can on said frequent flyers alongside with pictures so they can identify you and greet you by name.
As you probably guessed, the move has a lot of people criticizing British Airways. In their defense, it seems that they do have genuinely good intentions with the initiative. The company’s head of customer analysis, Jo Boswell, told betanews that they’re “trying to recreate the feeling of recognition you get in a favorite restaurant when you’re welcomed there, but in our case it will be delivered by thousands of staff to millions of customers.”
I can totally get behind BA providing a more personal service. It’s a nice gesture and it will go a long way to make what could be a miserable plane ride at least tolerable. My problem is that they are using Google to look up information and pictures of the passenger. Do they think that every name is unique and that people don’t look alike?
Here’s a better idea for British Airways. They should offer frequent fliers the option to upload personal information (name, likes, dislikes) and a picture to some kind of database. The flight attendants could then use this as an extra perk that they could offer to frequent fliers. I’m sure some people, no matter how often they fly, don’t want to get chummy with flight attendants.
Google just announced on its Small Business Blog a new platform to help small business owners build their Google sites, called Webmaster Academy. In a 19-step process, users can:
– Learn how Google works
– Make sure Google knows about your site
– Influence your site’s listing in search
– Create great content
– Images and video
– Connect with Google+
– Access extra resources
Webmaster Academy better explains how Google search operates, and how website owners can better optimize their content for search. Information on how to better utilize Google’s Webmaster Tools is offered, as well as general web design tips. Below is a clip describing Google Search:
Impending posts from the Webmaster Academy will include topics like:
– An explanation of how Google Search works
– How best to represent a brick and mortar business online
– An introduction to Search Engine Optimization
Earlier today, comScore numbers were leaked showing that both Google and Bing were rising slightly in market share at the combined expense of Yahoo! Now, Experian Marketing Services, a different digital information marketer, has released April search engine market share numbers that contradict that notion.
Experian has Google actually losing 3.4 % of the search market share over the course the past year. They put Google currently at 64.4% of the market. Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, have improved numbers over the comScore report, with a combined 30% market share as of April 2012. Bing is up 2% with a 14.3% market share and Yahoo! is up 1.1% with 15.7% of the search market.
It’s hard to know which report to trust in this situation. Both have year-long trends going in different directions, meaning either their data sets or their methods of parsing that data differ. Though the comScore report has not been officially released yet, the Experian data is based on a sample of 10 million U.S. internet users, and is for web searches only – meaning they are missing mobile searches, which have become a sizable chunk of Google’s searches. Also, the fact the Experian has Yahoo! with a higher individual share of searches than Bing is, intuitively, odd. Either way, it’s clear that Google has more than double Bing’s and Yahoo!’s market share combined. That means Bing is in for a long, hard battle if it hopes to take down Google with the new Bing layout it announced yesterday.
What do you think? Has Google sprung a leak or is Yahoo! sunk? Will the new Bing make a difference in the numbers this time next year? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Hamish McKenzie over at PandoDaily recently noticed an interesting “glitch” regarding how Google lists its reviews of various places in search. For example, when searching for Fior d’Italia Restaurant in San Francisco, Google initially presents 145 reviews. Though, when actually reading said reviews, only 17 are actually present. Here’s a look at the discrepancy:
Even if one were to take into account the external reviews listed by TripAdvisor, OpenTable and Citysearch, there are still 34 missing reviews.
I took a look at 7 random businesses, and was unable to duplicate these sort of findings. For example, after a search of Seviche Restaurant in Louisville, Google listed 26 Google reviews, and all were magically accounted for:
McKenzie sent an email to Google to ask what the deal was, and this is what the search giant had to say on the matter:
We’re currently experiencing a technical error in which the total number of Google reviews is accurately appearing in the Places listing, but only some of the reviews are appearing on the corresponding Place page. We’re aware of this error affecting a limited number of Google Places listings, and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.
Google’s Search Blog just announced its new Search Education Website, a new platform which can help students in the classroom become better at using search while learning.
Tasha Bergson-Michelson, Google Search Educator, relates a scenario to where students were able to use Google’s Search by Image tool to find out more about a picture they’d found on a website. The class was very pleased when they were able to locate the source of the original, which ended up being an encyclopedia from 1826. Google seeks to educate students on this new form of problem-solving, to better play detective. All of this is quite a step up from trying to locate Carmen Sandiego.
Bergson-Michelson states, “Search education provides the technical tools and critical thinking skills crucial to preparing today’s students to be technologically self-reliant, independent learners.” The Google Search Education group has been conducting classes for years to help educators see how valuable Google Search is regarding academic research. Google has also created a Search Education hub, featuring lesson plans built around the Common Core State Standards and “A Google a Day” search challenges, as well as training videos.
I have a confession to make – I hate math. Of course, as a writer, that shouldn’t be all that suprising. Most writers, as far as I understand, go into writing because we’re terrible at math and other practices that involve numbers. There was always one thing that I did like doing in math, however, and that was creating graphs. Google made my day when they introduced graph creation in Search a few months back and now it’s even better.
Google showed off their new graphing technology on the Search blog today. It uses WebGL, the Web’s answer to creating 3D models and animations, to create a three-dimensional graph when students, or graph maniacs, plot out two variable functions into search.
Three-dimensional graph fun doesn’t just stop at the creation of said graphs. Users can click on the graph to rotate, zoom and do all sorts of cool things with it. You can also edit the range in real time in the dialog boxes on the bottom right. To see it in action, check out this awesome “mountain” graph in 3D.
For you math heads out there, Google claims that students studying advance calculus will really benefit from the 3D modeling. I’m sure the math types out there are going to love this, but I just love making Christmas Trees in Google Search using the graph function.
As stated before, this new features runs off of WebGL. You’re going to need a modern Web browser like Chrome or Firefox to take advantage of it. If you aren’t using those browsers in the first place, this should be the tipping point for you to start using them. Nothing better than making 3D objects in your browser and watching them spin around.
It should be noted that the feature is now available on a global scale. Students everywhere can take advantage of the 3D graph modeling now. I don’t know if it’s going to make your math exploits any easier, but it will make the creation of math art far more interesting.
Google Search has a pretty impressive spell check in place that lets you know if you’ve spelled a word wrong and gives you suggestions as to what word you might have been wanting to spell. Turns out the guys that run Google Docs thought this was pretty cool too as they’re bringing it to Docs.
Yew Jin Lim, a software engineer with Google, penned a piece today on the Docs Blog about his team bringing search spell check to Google Docs. The key advantage here is that the spell check in Google Docs will no longer rely on a dictionary for the words you spell. Like Google Search, Docs spell check will now adapt with the Web.
Lim shows off a few pretty impressive examples of Google’s new spell check. The first shows him typing in “Icland is an icland.” As I typed that into my text editor, both instances of “icland” are underlined and the spell check gives me three choices – Iceland, inland and island. Google claims that their spell check is contextual and once it knows that the first word is Iceland, it will correct the second “icland” to “island.”
It will also fix that little problem of people using the wrong, but properly spelled, word. Lim uses the example of “Let’s meat tomorrow morning for coffee.” He says that Google’s spell check will correct the “meat” to “meet” based on context.
Google is also taking into account the fact that the Web is constantly evolving and making up new words. If the word becomes popular enough, it will be added to the spell checker. Lim uses the example of Skrillex being included as a word now in Google Docs.
The new spell check system is available right now for Google Docs and presentations in English. They are hoping to roll out the new system to other languages soon.
As a writer, this makes me excited. Having a constantly evolving spell check would solve a lot of the problems current spell checks have, especially those that automatically change the word on you.
‘Hotel Finder” by Google has refined its functionality to include ‘Hotels by Travel Time’. I like it! I have to ask why they never thought to have this before. So many times i’ve booked a hotel that the search said was near my event and when I arrived, I found the two destinations were miles apart. Google has addressed this issue with a refinement to their ‘Hotel Finder’ tool. ‘Find Hotels by Travel Time’ is an enhancement which allows users to select their mode of transportation and allowable travel time to find appropriately located accommodations.
Choose from mass transit, pedestrian, car, whatever; the search will give you the time and distance for the means you choose. This way you won’t be wasting time on unplanned travel and unforeseen obstacles.
If you’re going to a conference and there’s a hotel right across the street, it might make sense to stay there even if it costs more money. You could save some extra cash by not getting a rental car and make the whole experience more efficient and enjoyable.
Half the time a trip could be more fun if I could centralize my accommodations to the events and activities I will be attending. Freeing myself from the burden of navigating foreign landscapes could be key to having the most pleasant experiences. Sounds like Google’s on that.
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