The Last Ten Days in Search: Part 1 – Real Time Search and Personalised Search
- December 14, 2009
- by Dave Freeman
It’s been a big 10 days in search. Possibly even the biggest in search for 2 years, with Google rolling out an impressive range of new features. Of which the biggest were personalised search and real-time search.
I’m going to be rolling out this three part series of posts digging into these new features. Today I’ll discuss real-time search and personalised search, part two on Wednesday will examine Google Image Swirl and Google Goggles, then finally on Friday part three will look at the seven new Google Analytics features.
Google Real-time search
Everyone’s been discussing the real-time search race. Many have tried to implement real-time, but no-one has come close to success. Last week Google shocked the online world by announcing and instantly rolling out its real-time search offering. Google were expected to be the first but I don’t think many people expected it to happen this year.
The offering currently includes Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, blogs posts and the latest news, all as it happens. The real-time results are displayed at varying positions on results pages in an auto-updating container. The example below shows Google’s real-time results container and the example tweet I made from my account @davefreeman. Likewise if I published a blog post from Latitude’s blog or my SEO blog that discussed SEO it could also be shown in the real-time stream for SEO.
Why is real-time important?
Google’s normal results interface shows you historical results based on relevance. Whereas real-time shows you what’s happening on the web that second. This will become particularly relevant during major breaking news stories.
Real-time search has and could have many impacts:
- Firstly it places an additional content block in the organic results, which could have an impact on click thru rate.
- It adds further opportunities to gain visibility on the first page of Google albeit for only a few seconds.
- It could get users to spend more time on Google – for news and big events users will just watch the real-time stream rather than clicking through to an actual result.
Google places itself in somewhat of a quandary with PPC though, as the real-time results will grab the user’s attention and possibly reduce click-thru rate, yet at the same time the web has been screaming out for real-time results. Could this see real-time results removed from high earning PPC searches or even paid ads mixed in with the real-time results? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Google Personalised Results
It means that for every user not opted out rankings could vary. This means that as an SEO metric rankings are again in the spotlight. Some industry experts believe rankings as a success metric are dead.
Personally I don’t agree; rankings have evolved into something even more useful. Previously rankings showed where you ranked in Google, which whilst the results were almost the same for each user was useful.
Now we can gain a whole lot more knowledge from rankings. From Google Analytics we can identify the position at which each organic click came from, which means:
- We can determine the average rankings position across all clicks
- We can find the highest and lowest position
- We can find out how many clicks came from each position
Okay, those stats are good but how does that help? Well we can actually gain insight into what users think of the site and brand. It could highlight potential usability and user experience problems; it could help determine if the brand has perception issues i.e. a strong drop in rankings for some product areas whilst seeing a gain in others and if a site goes through a redesign it could help us gain insight into users thoughts.
In addition, it increases the importance of brand awareness channels such as social media. If your brand is in the users mind then they are more likely to click on your organic results or search directly for it.
There is one thing that personalisation hasn’t changed, if your site isn’t near the top you aren’t in the running for a click. This means that you still need to get your site onto the first page of Google to be in running. That means pushing forward with an SEO campaign which utilises the current on-page and off-page optimisation tactics.
What does this mean for SEO and Search?
These two new features have really brought about an evolution in search. Google’s achievement in being the first to rollout real-time search is huge, and it puts Bing’s earlier Twitter integration attempt to shame. The effect on CTR and paid search is yet to be seen, I don’t think we’ll see a big impact as a whole but for certain queries such as news and sport the impact could be sizeable.
Personalisation is a really exciting move as its going to shake the results up on a user by user basis using an individual’s search history to show them the results that Google deem to be most relevant to them. This means it’s no longer good enough to just rank on the first page of Google, the sites that occupy these positions are going to need to offer a good user experience in order to stay there.
For me these new features are a fantastic enhancement to Google, SEO and search in general. These features are just the confirmation that many have been waiting for - that social media and user experience are now a vital part of creating a truly successful SEO campaign.
SEO has evolved again, and it’s going to make for an exciting 2010.
2 Comments
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Robert Nicholson
Good article - and I agree, with personalisation its more important than ever to be appearing near the term on those early search phrases.