Search Engines After Next Few Years
More than 53% of all trackable traffic on the internet comes from organic search and roughly 15% comes through paid search on search engines. These estimates only take trackable traffic into consideration. It is safe to say that search engines such as Google, YouTube, and social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter account for most of the traffic on the internet, especially in the USA.
With Google having the lions share of traffic in the search engine market, as well as the lions share in the browser industry, it is safe to say that the search engine has deep insights as well as all the data pertaining to what people search for, what websites they browse, how much time they spent on said websites, the pages they visit and more. With access to so much data, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to personalize everyones experience and improve its ability to predict your searches.
To do that, you have millions of crawlers gathering data online and millions of lines of code sorting that data, processing it, turning it into useful information. In short, the search results you get and the search recommendations you get as you start typing in your search phrase are all being personalized to your preferences based on your past actions. Search engines such as Google and YouTube are arguably turning into AIs. They are using machine learning algorithms (Rank Brain) in processing user data. They are scary correct in predicting what you are searching for and recommending your topics of interest to you. So what does the future look like for Google as machine learning and self-learning technologies evolve further. Here are our predictions:
Google updates will become much more frequent and unannounced
So far Google announces any major algorithm updates and all SEOs keep a close eye on their rankings and traffic when an update is rolled out. Usually, such updates are announced well in advance. However, in January, Google rolled out an update and announced it at the last minute.
Since then, the world has been busy with Coronavirus but there have been hushed whispers on Reddit and similar communities about major drops or increases in peoples rankings, with enough cases to rule it out as isolated incidents. Google has also been experimenting with how search results appear. And quickly going back to the older way of doing things if the new experiment doesnt work out. This means that their capacity of doing quick, small scale experiments as well as rolling out massive updates is increasing thanks to Rank Brain, and soon we can expect monthly and even weekly updates to how personalization works.
This means major changes in search rankings and big fluctuations in traffic for many websites in the days to come.
