This past Sunday, July 25th, I had the pleasure of seeing one of Google’s top employees speak in my home town.
Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology at Google, was the first person founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired to help develop what has now become the world’s premier information resource. After 11 years, Silverstein is still with the company and exudes much excitement about its past and future…not to mention the possibilities in mobile and social search.
One interesting side note about Craig…he was visiting my hometown of Gainesville, Florida for his 20-year high school reunion, which coincidentally, is the same high school I graduated from 9 years later.
But while he was in town, he thought he would take a couple hours and speak to the community he called home during his childhood. While the audience was mainly interested people in the community who were not necessarily interested in Google’s algorithm and ranking high in the search results, he did touch on a few of those things and other issues that will be a big part of any online marketers life.
Specifically, the development of mobile and social search technology are increasingly becoming ways people are finding information online.
With regards to mobile search, more and more people are using “smart phones” like BlackBerry, IPhone and even Google’s smart phone, the Anroid. In the future, and closer than we think according to Silverstein, people’s primary device for finding information will be their mobile devices.
Think about it – you’re visiting a town and need to find a place to eat. Or, you need to find a place to get a haircut. Flip out your phone, do a search and voila, you got a list of different businesses in the area you’re in.
We’ve mentioned before the importance of local search, especially if you’re a local business like a restaurant or store. If you fall into this category, you will certainly need to have mobile search on your radar screen going forward.
Social search, which Google pursues through its Google Buzz, Google Wave and its new Google Me is another area that’s seeing tremendous growth. Of course, Facebook is the king of social networks right now and as you know is pursuing social search with a vengeance.
Why is social search important? Not only do people enjoy finding information on their own, they also like to ask their friends about products, ideas or whatever. Since trusting an online source is harder to do (you never see the person on the other side), Internet users want to be able to interact with people they know and find information that way as well.
And perhaps one of the most fascinating technologies for the future of search – voice search. That’s right, instead of typing in your search terms, you can simply say what you’re looking for. Google is working on voice translation technology to take your spoken words and translate them into written words.
Much of Craig’s talk though centered on Google’s history and the history of search in general. Google wasn’t the first search engine – even in the online world.
In fact, the first search engine was the Bible concordance, a reference manual for terms found within the Bible. But instead of it being like an encyclopedia or dictionary where you look up a word and find its meaning, the concordances took a word and told you where you could find them in the Bible.
Fundamentally speaking, this is how search engines work. You take a keyword phrase, type it in and see where on the Internet that word appears. And when search engines were new, that’s about all it involved…keywords and the number of times they appeared on a page.
Of course, search engines have evolved way beyond this.
Concordances were simply correct. Then with the advent of Google and PageRank, searches are not only correct but authoritative as well. Pages with higher PageRank were seen as being more trustworthy. Now, a good result is considered correct, authoritative (trustworthy) AND timely as well.
We’re seeing this play out in Google’s development (think Caffeine/algorithmic updates).
At the conclusion of Silverstein’s remarks at his childhood synagogue, Craig took questions from the audience. Most of them were about different technologies and efforts the company is working on like Google TV. The last question was about Google Fiber and Gainesville’s application to be the first site of this venture.
Unfortunately for the Gator Nation though, Craig doesn’t have anything to do with Google Fiber’s application process.
When I got the opportunity, I asked Craig about Caffeine and how the company expects the update to provide better search results for people. I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer a direct SEO question since in the end, they’re not going to share how their algorithm works too much because surprise, they make a lot of their money by selling PPC ads to companies.
But friends, I’m sorry to say that he didn’t answer much besides saying they do a lot of experimentation with a small set of searchers to see how things work before they go with it entirely. Beyond that, he told me point blank that he couldn’t go into that.
No worries, I understand. But the talk was still fascinating from the perspective of what we do at SEO Advantage and the past, present and future of search…which by the way, is nowhere near being fully developed.
Craig says that could be another 150 years from now! Wow, we got a long way to go!
