The Future of Search
WILL CRITCHLOW

This query really shouldn’t work

But it does

Understand, not just index

See reddit for more
Original thread

When someone searches for “best”
From Google Trends

They probably don’t mean a page
that says “best”

Watch this presentation for more
Read this. Watch this.

Present information better

There are a lot of cards

I have a theory that this is
positioned to train us to look in
the right hand sidebar

I have a theory that this is
positioned to train us to look in
the right hand sidebar

Sometimes UI helps refine the query

All of this enables
voice search

Live now in Chrome and on Android

“what time is it in New York?”

Query refinement
is called
“conversational
search”

Who talks to their phone?
I said

I’m coming round to the idea

Signed-in everywhere is
crucial

It’s really hard not to be signed in

Chrome sync is just the beginning
I predict we are going to see cookie sync

Android blurs the line with the web

Query enhancement is
improving

“london tube stations”
query
Old Query Model

explicit query
implicit query
iPhone user, on street in London
“london tube stations”
New Query Model

New Query Model

Query Scale
TIME
TOTALSIGNALINFORMATION
explicit signal
implicit signal

Query Scale
TIME
TOTALSIGNALINFORMATION
explicit signal
implicit signal

Query Scale
TIME
TOTALSIGNALINFORMATION
explicit signal
implicit signal

Query Scale
TIME
TOTALSIGNALINFORMATION
explicit signal
implicit signal

Query Scale
TIME
TOTALSIGNALINFORMATION
explicit signal
implicit signal

Where does this end?

My vision when we started Google 15
years ago was that eventually you
wouldn't have to have a search
query at all. You'd just have
information come to you as you
needed it.
-- Sergey Brin, Google

Queryless search

Is this even search?

Does it matter?
It certainly helps explain (not provided)

Let’s not forget the basics

Desktop search is still growing
That’s 20 billion searches / month in the US
2007 March 2013

Sites report growing mobile search
Via RKG

Hampered by measurement issues
Via RKG

...but backed by Google statistics
% smartphone users searching every day
2011
2012
2011
2012

...and converting like crazy

Social can be search too
That’s how I found the data on the previous slide

So is search marketing
becoming
“just good marketing”?

Google would like us to
think so

You might have noticed googlebot
coming round more often

The caffeine update enabled all the
more recent changes

No SEO
presentation is
complete without
an angry penguin

Penguin and Panda = progress
Bad links
Bad content

Their biggest win is spreading fear

Bad stuff still works short term
But brands are rightly scared (finally)

Coming soon: bad merchant update
Don’t make your customers angry

But not all of search is
regular marketing

Make pages primarily for
users, not for search
engines
-- Google webmaster guidelines
This used to go even further

These days we
feed the robot in
all kinds of ways
Robots.txt
Sitemaps
Schema
...etc

The future looks great for
search

The future looks great for
search marketers

Technical skills +
Data +
Building an audience

I’ve talked about this elsewhere
http://www.distilled.net/store/ll-2013-wc-critchlow/

WILL CRITCHLOW
Founder, Distilled
will.critchlow@distilled.net
@willcritchlow

Image creditshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/paolomargari/1992019542/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarit_arora/8543078505/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flysi/183272970/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yjv/4649068019/