Two very big pieces of news from Apple’s WWDC 2016:
Siri is coming to macOS (a.k.a. OS X).
Google will not be the default search engine.
We’ve got exclusive video of how it went down:
This means that voice search is about to become more prevalent than it already is. With voice searches making up roughly 25% of all searches; voice search is today where mobile search was just a few years ago. Expect that number to increase with the release of the new macOS.
This definitely has the potential to shake up the search engine market-share (which, as Tim Berners-Lee will tell you, is a good thing). But probably what will happen is users will search on a non-Google search engine, angrily say “WTF is this S?” and then set default search to Google.
macOS Sierra comes out later this year, so we’ll be keeping an eye on how that goes down…
How Google Maps a Query to an Entity (for Autocomplete)
Recently, SourceFed did some “hard-hitting” selective research and proclaimed that Google was in Hilldog’s pocket, censoring the autocomplete search function from filling in anything negative relating to FBI inquiries and email etc. etc. (that’s as political as we’re gonna get here).
Here’s the link if you want to go watch that video, and see how a) selectively presenting data can back up a controversial claim, and b) why (if this was true) search engine diversity is such an important thing to have.
As a bonus, you can really see how controversy drives views, as the video is coming up on 1,000,000 views, and got coverage on nearly every big media/news site (Hellooooooo Linkjuice!).
Bill Slawski weighs on on a patent Google was just granted on mapping search queries to a specific subject/entity.
“Hillary Clinton” that used the terms “email charges” rather than “criminal charges” as SourceFed was guessing should be how Google would map the topic of that query. Sourcefed didn’t map out the query the way that Google did, but Google did have autosuggestions that covered that topic. If we compare Google trends information for both terms added to the entity “Hillary Clinton”, those terms seem to be close to each other in regards to how much interest searches appear to have shown for each of those queries:
We’ve previously talked about the importance of keyword intent, and understanding Google’s process for assigning meaning to keywords/phrases is important to understand. Click on through and read the whole article. Slawski is good at breaking complex data down using real-world examples.
Each year Mary Meekers, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers releases an “internet trends analysis,” looking at the rising and fading fads of net. She covers things like: the rise of VR, the safety of data, the role of apps in daily lives, and so on. If you/your business relies on the web (which, let’s be honest, if you’re reading this in the first place, it does), this is a very valuable report.
Lots of sites have done summaries of this presentation, condensing the slides down into what they think are the most important points. Here’s one example, calling back to the Siri on macOS story above:
Voice is the new interface: As voice recogniser technologies get better (now accuracy is getting nearer to 95-99% which is far from the tragicomic experience we all remember a few years back) users shift from typing to voice interfaces. The reasons vary but in a nutshell, voice is perceived as a safer means of communicating with our devices in many scenarios (such as driving, for example) but also because it is faster and nearer to human interaction. Texting seems to be on its way out…Voice search is on the way in…..
Good stuff! But you don’t have take MY word for it! ? ?
Here’s the entire slideshow (all 200+ slides). Grab a drink and settle in. This is one piece of content worth consuming yourself.
Here’s a post by Neil Patel(‘s ghost writer) about repurposing content–for traffic and links.
There’s a lot of fear and confusion around things like duplicate content penalties that I think Google doesn’t exaclty discourage and benefits from…
But here’s something I agree with, from the article, and think you should consider as well:
I’ve already mentioned that there’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Google reserves the right to penalize your website, only if you’re excessively copying content in a manipulative manner.
When repurposing, you are only trying to increase the awareness of your brand – so you aren’t violating Google’s guidelines.
This article ends with several “case studies” (more like tweet-sized examples) of instances where someone repurposing content has seen some significant benefits.
Cannibalizing the SERPs with your original content + repurposed content?
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Sean Markey
Obsessive consumer of SEO news and strategies, writes the This Week in SEO column. Loves playing drums and writing fiction. Bets you he can throw a football over them mountains.
