Why Google know best (better than you too)

Posted by Dave CollinsSEO

The anti-Google brigade seem to have missed Google’s greatest coup: not only knowing everything about us, but now even understanding our intentions better than we do ourselves.

For example when I search for Cloud Computing, of the nine standard results that Google show me, six are variations of “what is cloud computing“, even though I may have been looking for cloud computing companies, cloud computing providers, security, examples or more. This is very much Hummingbird in action.

And when I, as an SEO, set my page title and description to help Google and visitors alike understand the content of my page, Google may choose to display a title and/or description of their choosing, according to what they think the page may be about, and according to what they think the searcher may be looking for.

So we have search results that are tailored according to what Google decide I’m really looking for, and not to what I said I was looking for. And we have Google deciding what a page is really about, and not what the content creator says it is about.

Prior to this, some believed that Google knew more about a person than any other person. Today Google have cleared that final obstacle. The difference is enormous with potentially far-reaching consequences.

The old Google model

 

The new Google model

 

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