Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.
This week we might as well rename the weekly round-up ‘a ton of new stuff from Google’, as there’s nothing but new products and announcements from the big G for as far as the eye can see.
Next week we’ll try and do an exclusive Ask Jeeves round-up.
Google I/O reveals the future of artificial intelligence
As Mike O’Brien reported this week, Google’s annual conference revealed plenty of product announcements and improvements, with artificial intelligence taking centre stage thanks to its new Google Assistant tool.
Google Assistant combines voice search with the rest of Google’s AI capabilities and integrates various other third party products including Uber, Fandango and OpenTable. “While Siri can tell you what time The Jungle Book is playing, you can’t actually purchase tickets through her.”
Other announcements from Google I/O
Mike already covered these in detail, but I’ll quickly run through the list again:
- Google Home: an answer to Amazon Echo, which lets you control various aspects of your connected home.
- Allo: a messaging app with Google’s AI built in. The suggested responses will be based on your past responses, in both text and image form.
- Duo: a video-calling app that includes a live stream of the person calling, allowing you to potentially gauge their mood. Mostly furious probably.
- Daydream: Google’s own virtual reality (VR) platform. Unlike Cardboard, which works with any smartphone, Daydream will only work on new phones with specially-built sensors and screens. It will contain VR versions of YouTube, StreetView and Netflix.
- Android Wear: Google’s smart watch will be updated to include a tiny keyboard, the ability to show data from any application, and automatic activity activation.
Google launches a mobile analytics platform for apps: Firebase
In a very busy week, Google also announced a new analytics tool, which Sophie Loras has covered in detail here: Google launches Firebox.
The analytics platform is free and unlike Google Analytics, it’s designed specifically for mobile apps, so developers can see what users are doing inside the app, how paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution and where users are coming from.
All viewed from a single dashboard:
BBC closed its Food website, controversy ensued
In one of the more sensitive, politically charged stories of the week, the BBC mothballed its 11,000 free to access recipes in order to save budget and to seemingly bow to government and commercial pressure.
In Graham Charlton’s article (found in the above link) we debate the various SEO ramifications of de-indexing content and shutting down site-search.
However as an update, the BBC have ‘climbed down’ from the decision and moved the recipes to its ad-funded Good Food site.
Google updates Search Console’s ‘Search Analytics’ with AMP filter
Although you’ve been able to see how Google indexes your accelerated mobile pages in Search Console for a short while now, Google has just started rolling out an AMP filter in the ‘Search Analytics’ report.
Just had to the ‘Search Appearance’ option on the top filter selection and you’ll be able to see any queries that brought mobile searchers to your AMP content. Although my own Search Console has yet to be updated, so thanks to Search Engine Journal for the image.
Google introduces ‘Rich Cards’ markup
Google will start to show rich cards for two content categories: recipes and movies, and will initially appear in mobile search results in English for google.com.
There is also already a Rich Card report set up in your Search Console…
The cards are easy enough to implement, I’ve tried it out with a few webpages already, and I’ll let you know the results in due course.
Six most interesting search marketing news stories of the week
Six most interesting search marketing news stories of the week
SEW
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