Evolution of Search by Doug Platts, Head of Natural Seach iCrossing at the 9th Communication Conference in Cyprus

1. EVOLUTION OF SEARCH Doug Platts, Head of Natural Search iCrossing UK 1

2. THE ORIGINAL PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESS 2 Can search engines access the site and pages Is there search term rich, optimised on-page content Is the site a reputable resource, based on references from other sites FUNDAMENTALS

3. evolution developing signals of Search

4. vince The Big brand update 4

5. caffeine increased speed of google’s infrastructure 5

6. May day It’s about quality links 6

7. personalisation Integration of past site visits 7

8. Social signals Personalisation: integration of the social graph 8

9. panda User data based judgment of the quality of content 9

10. +1 button User Votes on the quality of content 10

12. Google Instant – being visible through the user journey

13. Google Preview – clear creative message. An extension of your listing/ad

14. Meta Descriptions – your elevator pitch

15. Google +1 – your social graph recommending sites11

16. Established blend THE typical shape of seo for brands 12 Factor strength High Low

17. The new approach search visibility as an outcome of a connected brand 13 Factor strength High Low

19. Personalized Results

20. Collective IQ

21. Popular Site Content

22. Integration of Social Messages

23. Conversational Search

24. Expanded Facebook Profile Search

25. Travel Wish List & Friends Who Live Here

26. Flight Deals

27. Shared Shopping Listshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPYVqHZKF2g

28. Your social graph Search & social: two converging trends RealtimeSearch & Social Signals 15 A better understanding of who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish and a web that is much more dynamic and timely. Together, these two things demand that search becomes more temporally relevant, in addition to just being semantically relevant. Search is moving from being “stateless” to being very much in the here and now. For example, conversations in social media happen very much in real time. As we begin to apply what’s happening in the social graph as an additional ranking criterion to the information indexed in a search engine, interesting things begin to happen.

29. User intent What are you really looking for When we use a search engine for a specific task, it’s actually part of a much bigger and more complex task These life events (and they don’t all have to be this momentous) bring with them a myriad of needs for specific information. We plug in the pieces as we gather them, but the heavy lifting is all done by us. But what if search knew our “master intent” and offered a much higher level of assistance, going out and gathering all the information, filtering it based on our requirements and guiding us through the entire process? Search focussed around our intent 16

30. Language barrier More than words can say Looking beyond the limitations of language 17 There is a challenge in our current paradigm of search, built on the concept of relevancy. It depends heavily on the ability of a machine to understand human language. Search engines reliance on parsing language isn’t as critical as it was before. As we do more things online, we leave more signals to help a search engine determine our intent. Search engines now gather more information about the current situation of the user: location, their current activity, their place in the social grid. All these things can augment a query, allowing for a more useful experience.

31. Being useful Being useful to me Usefulness depends on the ability to know who we are, what we’re doing and what we hope to accomplish The EU have recently ruled on the use of cookies and new regulations which will mean that companies will need a user's permission to store a cookie on their devices Audit the use of all cookies on your website Assess and rank the privacy implications of these Decide on an appropriate solution with which to gain user consent 18 Search & User Privacy

32. Mobile search But not as we know it Mobile search will not be search as we currently understand it An explosion of tablets and mobile products, and apps iPhone and iPad apps, which have passed 200,000 and are growing by 20,000 per week Web-browsing, particularly on mobile devices is becoming mostly App-focused, not Web focused Apple's new search engine will not compete with Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! in indexing Web pages, but it will index Apps http://blip.tv/file/3709806 19

33. THANK YOU 20 @dougplatts