Amit Singhal – The senior Vice President and Google Fellow at Google Search was interviewed yesterday by Guy Kawasaki at the SXSW conference held in Austin. The topic was “The Future of Google Search in a Mobile World”
I am sure the whole SEO industry is all ears when Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal speak at any conference as what they say is like the weather forecast for the SEO industry so that you can prepare yourself for the coming changes in the search scenario.
Thanks to the Twitter stream at #AskSinghal and the live blogging by Search Engine Land it was like being present at the conference.
What Amit Singhal discussed is as follows:
1. Google has over 30 trillion URLs from 250 million domains in their index.
2. The perfect search engine should know exactly what to be, and give you exactly what you want.
3. The World Wide Web is the biggest depository of human knowledge with 30 trillion web addresses and 250 million domains.
4. As search has gotten better, user queries have gotten more complicated and harder to answer effectively.
5. Mobile devices have revolutionized search
6. Mobile search increases during lunch and dinner hours, so clearly more than just teens are online at the dinner table
7. We're designing search so you can use it from any modality at any time.
8. Google+ enables us to make Google truly universal.
9. High quality content that adds value is deemed desirable, ranks higher in search
10. Think of good SEO as marketing to the search engine. >
11. SEOs add value when improving content.
12. We live in a visual world. #Video is searchable. Google needs to reign in video property tag identifiers for audience's to search
13. Voice is a far more natural interface than typing. But may require other interfaces to work
14. Future of search is bringing valuable content to the world
15. The future of search is a Star Trek computer. Search across multiple modes, voice, type etc.
16. High quality content that provides utility is deemed desirable, ranks higher in search.
17. Future of search is understanding the knowledge on the web, not just indexing and retrieving.
18. If you want to get to the first page of Google results then provide high quality content that adds value. That's it!
19. In the future, Google should be able to tell you what you need to know without you having to ask.
20. Having the knowlege is not enough, Google works to understand the knowledge.
21. Career Advice from Amit Singhal - "Follow your heart...happiness is more important than any money you can make. "There are no right decisions, you make your decision right"
22. User experience and speed has always driven decision at Google and shall always be .
23. The only way to truly improve is to use scientific methodology
24. It's too early to evaluate Facebook graph search. Time will tell if people need it.
25. Latency is a big problem in developing countries. That's why Google invests in infrastructure...so everyone can access Google
26. Google glasses is just one of many input devices. It gives users another context and new opportunities for search
27. Any changes you make in Google search will improve some queries and hurt others
28. To understand the future of search, we need to understand future input devices.
29. Search will do for education what calculators did for math. Don't memorize facts, search will take care of the mundane!
30. I phrase my search term as naturally as possible; if it doesn't work someone on my team gets yelled at.
31. Google's big challenges: Knowledge graph, speech recognition, natural language understanding
32. We do not manually fix searches to improve search. Google only manually intervenes in SERPs in terms of spam, porn and legal issues.
33. Every broken query is an improvement waiting to happen.
34. Google search has a feedback link at the end if every search results page for failed
