First of all, from the per­spec­tive of the user, Google’s changes mark an evo­lu­tion of search beyond a tool used to search for infor­ma­tion to one used by us to do the things we want to do. It’s mov­ing from using rel­e­vancy as the sole mea­sure of suc­cess to incor­po­rat­ing use­ful­ness. The algo­rithm is chang­ing to keep pace with the changes in the web as a whole. No longer is it just the worlds biggest repos­i­tory of text based infor­ma­tion – it’s now a liv­ing, inter­ac­tive, func­tional net­work of apps, data and infor­ma­tion, extend­ing our capa­bil­i­ties through a vari­ety of con­nected devices. Google had to intro­duce these back-end changes. To not do so would be to guar­an­tee that they would soon become irrel­e­vant in the online world.

As Google suc­ceeds in con­sis­tently inter­pret­ing more and more sig­nals of user intent, it can become more con­fi­dent in pre­sent­ing a dif­fer­en­ti­ated user expe­ri­ence. It can serve a dif­fer­ent type of results set to a query that’s obvi­ously ini­ti­ated by some­one look­ing for infor­ma­tion than it does to the user that’s look­ing to do some­thing online. We’ve been talk­ing about the death of the mono­lithic set of search results for years now. In truth, it never died; it just faded away, pixel by pixel. The change has been grad­ual, but for the first time in sev­eral years of observ­ing search, I can truth­fully say that my search expe­ri­ence (whether on Google, Bing or the other com­peti­tors) looks sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent today than it did 3 years ago.

As search changes, so do the expec­ta­tions of users. And that impacts the “use case” of search. In it’s pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion, we accepted that search was one of a num­ber of nec­es­sary inter­me­di­ate steps between our intent and our ulti­mate action. If we wanted to do some­thing, we accepted the fact that we would search for infor­ma­tion, find the infor­ma­tion, eval­u­ate the infor­ma­tion and then, even­tu­ally, take the infor­ma­tion and do some­thing with it. The lim­i­ta­tions of the web forced us to take sev­eral steps to get us where we wanted to go.

But now, as we can do more of what we want to online, the steps are being elim­i­nated. Infor­ma­tion and func­tion­al­ity are often seam­lessly inte­grated in a sin­gle des­ti­na­tion. So we have less patience with seem­ingly super­flu­ous steps between that des­ti­na­tion and us. That includes search.

Soon, we will no longer be con­tent with con­sid­er­ing the search results page as a sort of index to online con­tent. We will want the func­tion­al­ity we know exists served to us via the short­est pos­si­ble path. We see this now with func­tion­al­ity and answers to com­mon infor­ma­tion requests being pushed to the top of the search results page.  What this does, in terms of user expe­ri­ence, is make the tran­si­tion from search page to des­ti­na­tion more crit­i­cal than ever. As long as search was a ref­er­ence index, the user expected to bounce back and forth between poten­tial des­ti­na­tions, decided which was the best match. But as search gets bet­ter at unearthing use­ful des­ti­na­tions, our “post-click” expec­ta­tions will rise accord­ingly.  What­ever lies on the other side of that search click bet­ter be good. The changes in Google’s algo­rithm are the first step (of sev­eral yet to come) to ensure that it is.

What this does for the SEO spe­cial­ist is to sud­denly push them towards con­sid­er­ing a much big­ger pic­ture than they pre­vi­ously had to worry about. They have to think in terms of a search user’s unique intent and expec­ta­tions. They have to under­stand the impor­tance of the tran­si­tion from a search page to a land­ing page and the func­tion­al­ity that has to offer. And, most of all, they have to coun­sel their clients of the increas­ing impor­tance of “use­ful­ness” and how poten­tial cus­tomers will use online to seek and con­nect to that use­ful­ness.  If the SEO com­mu­nity can tran­si­tion to that, there will always be need for them.

The SEO indus­try and the Google search qual­ity team have been play­ing a game of cat and mouse for sev­eral years now. It’s been more “hack­ing” than “mar­ket­ing” as SEO prac­ti­tion­ers prod for loop­holes in the Google algo­rithm. All too often, a top rank­ing was the end goal, with no thought to what that actu­ally meant in terms of true con­nec­tions with prospects.

In my mind, if that changes, it’s per­haps the best thing to ever hap­pen in the SEO business.


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.