Futurist Ramez Naam talk about the future of search

Ramez Naam, a futurist, founder and bestselling author, has written a science fiction "Nexus" and "Crux", and recently published a non-fiction literature, "Unlimited resources: The power of creativity on a finite planet", and he was once at Microsoft/ Bing is engaged in search work.

Ramez recently discussed his views on the future of the search with Stephan Spencer (author of the Art of SEO), and here's an excerpt from his point of view:

The future trend of search

1, Desktop Search will not disappear, but mobile will occupy the dominant position of search. Because the public will spend more and more time on the mobile side, content must be able to interact with the user on the mobile side, otherwise there is no use of SEO.

2. The search for a variety of input types (such as speech recognition) that mimics natural languages continues. But this process is going to be slow compared with the rapid development of the movement. Like how many people use Siri now? The tolerance of speech recognition error rate is very limited, not more than 5%, 1% or so acceptable. In addition, Ramez also found that in public or in a semi public voice search appears to be more abrupt, and will undermine privacy. In contrast, text input is better.

3, in the future there will be more and more like the use of structured data such as check the name of the movie. Google has discussed extracting data from the Web and supporting systematized data on its own web page. This point deserves attention.

Freshness plays an increasingly important role in search rankings

The freshness of the past is not important, but now 20% to 30% of the top-ranked query results have been updated in the last 24 hours or 48 hours. So if the site wants to keep its position, it has to update its contents at any time. Social content is an important factor affecting freshness.

AI is likely to become a content extract

The possibility of an excerpt exists. But this is a tricky thing because sometimes the meaning of a sentence can be quite different. And the most affected by the AI automatic excerpts of the industry is the news industry. In the past, a press briefing by The Associated Press would have been published with a slight modification of 5,000 websites, and newspapers, such as The Washington Post, would be followed by an AP report. The automatic excerpt is to list the Associated Press reports and to list those sites that add content. This can be said to be a threat to journalism, so news sites hate Google News.

Another industry similar to journalism is shopping, which has in common the mass reproduction of content-the same product information and basic description as the product is sold. But this content is not the shopping website, but the structured data provided by the merchant. In this case, the merchant is price and delivery speed.