Google is a(n) ______ engine?
Fill in the blank
Wait for it…Wait for it…it is worth it
Goal: To discuss effective marketing that pulls you in
Have you been mesmerized by an ad? I was this morning for 55 minutes.
This morning I could not sleep and woke up at around 4:30 a.m. I went downstairs and turned on the TV to YouTube. An ad popped up.
It started off with a story about King Luis XIV. He wanted to know about the Chinese dynasty that currently ruled that part of the world. He sent some smart people over to China and 5 years later he got his answers.
Compare that 5 years wait with our 0.5 seconds to get answers from Google.
The ad was about Google and the efforts that go into search and some of the newest features that they are working on integrating into the search.
When the world wide web started, it became obvious that without a way to search it it would be impossible to find anything easily. With so many pages, how do you know what each page holds and that it is relevant to what you need to know?
The original big idea behind Google was to catalog the information of the web. As a matter of fact, their current mission is the same.
Google mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
But it gets interesting to get that information correct. They struggle with wrong answers and make one heck of an effort to improve their algorithms to handle the issue behind the problem.
The ad even discussed the origination of the autofill prediction. Amazing how fake news has used this to lead people to wrong information. This is why they had to increase the authority and trustworthiness scores in order tp send people to fake news. The autofill option stops suggesting once it detects the search will lead to fake news or sites that are spam.
One of the newest additions to their search capabilities is BERT. It is their way of using natural language AI in their searches. It will be interesting to see over the next year or so how much better our searches results become.
What amazed me the most is that about 10–15% of our searches are new to Google. People are interested in knowing stuff that most people before were not interested into. There is an opportunity there to bring value.
The whole ad was fascinating…
BUT why am I talking about it?
Their mission of organizing the world information is the key. Most people would answer the article title with Google is a search engine.
BUT is it?
Google is an answer engine. You type a question in and google no longer sends you to another site but offers the information you request.
What!!!
Test it for yourself. Put the query of any president’s birthday and the answer will show up in less than 0.5 seconds.
They have cataloged the data on the web so well that they can extract information to present to you when you pose a question. Fascinating!!! And a bit scary. They are keeping you on their page and displaying ads to monetize their search results. It is a business after all. A business that collects a ton of data on all of us whether we like it or not.
In the end, having raw data(from websites) and cataloging it into information is not enough. This does not mean we know what to do with that information. How do I use it to benefit from that information? How does it become knowledge?
Maybe I need to do some searching…
My seven cents….(this is what I earned from Medium.com for Nov. 2020)
I got to go…my future self alarm went off
Robert Trajkovski is professional with experience in leading people and projects in Steel/ Power, Refining, Chemicals, Industrial Gasses, Software, Consulting and Academia. He has worked for both owners and engineering companies. In addition, he has instructed 73+ courses at several institutions and often offers his courses for free on LinkedIn.
