An Awesome Video from Google about How Much Search Has Changed
Below is a simple video from Google looking at how Google Search has changed since 1998. If you need any professional help with your local SEO please feel free to contact Whitefish Marketing on 01303 720 288. We offer a free and no-obligation consultation discovery call to see how we can help improve your SEO. Now… onwards with the video!!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EUyn5ws8lA
Video Transcript:
“Gosh, Google Search, 20 years ago, things have changed dramatically since then.
It’s astonishing how different things are.
Yeah. From the earlier days, 20 years ago, it’s really a totally different world.
You know what? Before we go any further, let’s look back at 1998. It had a movie about a boat, chain wallets, dial-up internet, Furby, frosted tips, El Nino, ice on the moon, the Euro, boy bands, digital video discs, and as of September 1998, a new search engine with a results page made up of 10 blue links and not much else. 10 blue links, 10 blue links. Nine blue links? Oh no, there it is. Yep. No matter what you searched for back then, the results looked pretty much the same. Great if you wanted links to websites, not so great if you didn’t.
So someone types in pictures of flowers and you give them 10 webpage links, that’s not really satisfying what they were searching for. They literally told you they wanted pictures.
Or if you type in 23 plus 43, you’re probably not looking for pages with those numbers. You’re actually looking to get an answer to that.
Every year since its arrival, people have expected more from Google. Their searches have gotten longer, more specific, more complex. To keep up, Search had to evolve. So how did Google Search go from nothing but blue links to pages assembled on the fly from hundreds of possible features? It didn’t happen overnight.
Nyowkee.
We saw that people weren’t just looking for webpages. They were also looking for images. They were looking for video. They were looking for news articles.
And over time, the set of helpful results we’ve given has broadened from just a bunch of webpages, to a bunch of other kinds of content.
Starting in 2005, a person looking for pictures got 10 blue links and pictures. By 2007, someone looking for a nearby laundromat got a map showing nearby laundromats. And by 2009, someone looking up the population of Chile got, yep, a graph charting the population of Chile, right there in Search.
When we started, we were a way to rank webpages, but Google is no longer just about the 10 blue links to websites, it’s actually about organizing information. That was always our mission.
And as it got better and better, people expect it to give you the exact answer or thing that you’re after.
Here’s another example: Added in 2013, the business listing feature helps business owners get their most up to date information out to the world, even if they don’t have a website, and lets searchers talk to someone who can answer their questions with just a tap. Today, businesses get more than a billion calls a year from people clicking on this button, right in Search.
Hal’s Hardware. You got Hal.
Search has come a long way since the days of all blue links all the time, from images, to maps, to how much saturated fat is in one donut. But if you ask the people working on it how things are going, they’ll tell you they’re still just getting started.
I really think that Search just has so much left to figure out.
And the better we do, the more difficult the task becomes because people say, “Oh, Google can do this; let me see if it can do that.” That challenge is never going to go away.
Not everything from ’98 has stood the test of time. But whether you’re looking for an image, a map, a link or something else entirely, one thing is certain, Search will keep evolving to be more useful and relevant with every passing year.”
