How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable
Google wants to improve its mobile search services by automatically delivering information you haven’t been searching for online.
Google delivers billions of searches for billions of people each and every day—for all kinds of things—but it would appear we still look in other directions and locations for certain types of information, and Google wants to know what those things are.
“Maybe these users ask a friend, or they have to look up a manual to put together their Ikea furniture,” says Jon Wiley, lead user experience designer for Google search. Wiley helped lead the research exercise, known as the Daily Information Needs Study.
The research was conducted over three days last month, at eight randomly chosen times a day and users were phoned and Google asked the question: “What did you want to know recently?”
The answers provided were part of an experiment involved about 150 people (not a big sample set). The intention was to enable Google to understand how it can deliver information to users that they’d never have thought to search for online.
Google’s search mission
If Google is to achieve its stated mission, says Wiley, to
“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible it must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it’s getting us better information that we really haven’t had in the past,” he says.
And Wiley says experience sampling—bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not—is the best way to do it.
In-depth articles in search results
Google announced this new initiative on its Google Webmaster Central Blog and outlined some of the ways that site owners can ensure their content is indexed and given proper attribution by using:-
- use schema.org “article” markup,
- provide authorship markup,
- rel=next and rel=prev for paginated articles (also watch out for common rel=canonical mistakes),
- provide information about your organization’s logo,
- and of course, create compelling in-depth content.
Read full Google Webmaster Blog post: In-depth articles in search results
MIT Technology Review Research: How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable
