From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO
How searches are performed today
- People search in all sorts of different ways. In general, when it comes to typing, people do fairly short searches, two to three words. With voice search, people are being much more conversational, using many more words, and perhaps searching in ways that they wouldn't have thought of before. The search engines are trying to compensate by all this in part by using machine learning to link some of these very short common searches to some of these very long ones. If you typed in, for example, weather in Huntington Beach, that might be very common, and the search engine has a very confident answer it's going to come up with, it sees that kind of search all the time. If you typed in something like, what's the weather like in HB in December? It's more arcane, it's more unusual, and they might not know how to match that with the traditional methods that they use, they would just kind of fall back and try to find pages with all those words. But in the machine learning systems, they may have a better confidence that you said weather, they can match the weather, you said HB, and they might understand that that's very correlated with the city of Huntington Beach, and it might get that you're saying December and it may then be able to figure out, well, you're looking for a range of time, or you're looking for a longer period than just the immediate weather, especially if it's not December, and then be able to figure out Huntington Beach weather archive or something like that. So people search in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes that will produce the different results that you see, even if you're looking for the same information. The search engines do have some technology where they're trying to overcome that. Another important thing is that people assume that all the search results are the same. What they search for and what they get back, they may assume is the same thing everybody gets, and the reality is, there are no normal search results. All the search results are going to be impacted first of all by your location, something that can change whether you're just a few miles from somebody else. Try a search for zoo or restaurants in one city, and in the next city it may be different, just by your geography, which makes sense if you're searching that generically. Then the other thing is that the search engines build up a history of what you've searched for. Even if you're not logged in, they can still build up a history for you over a period of days to understand things you've searched for before. That's useful, because if you had searched for, let's say Spain, and then you searched for travel, they can come back and maybe give you answers for Spanish travel because they're connecting the two things together and making a good guess that you want those same sorts of things. They may also alter your search results to better reward sites you clearly like. If you're constantly going to one site for results, maybe for product reviews and so on, but you just for some reason always go to Google to do the search, it may boost that particular website up higher, and you might then assume that everybody sees the same kind of results, but somebody may not because they have a different search history that's going on.
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