The Future of Google Search -- The SEM Daily: 5.10.23
a look at Google's new 'Magi' personalized search engine
This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and is a look at Google’s attempt to personalize search.
Google plans to make its search engine more “visual, snackable, personal, and human,” with a focus on serving young people globally, according to the documents. It plans to incorporate more human voices as part of the shift, supporting content creators in the same way it has historically done with websites, the documents say.
Why?
Long story short, Google sees the writing on the wall that kids these days aren’t really into the “10 blue links” style that Google has used to build a multi multi multi multi multi multi billion dollar business.
So what is Google building to try and engage this generation of non-house-owning-student-debt-laden digital natives?
Google plans to make its search engine more “visual, snackable, personal, and human,” with a focus on serving young people globally, according to the documents. It plans to incorporate more human voices as part of the shift, supporting content creators in the same way it has historically done with websites, the documents say.
This work is all being done under the name “Magi” if you want to look into it a bit more (though there’s not much out there at the moment, a fact which may change at today’s Google I/O conference). Here’s the article where I pulled all this from.
Coming up: my take on this whole thing. But first, a word from our sponsor:
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My Take
Google’s attempt to finally bury SEOs as tenderly as old Carl buries his wife Ellie at the beginning of Disney Pixar’s animated movie “Up” has a fancy name and some real “Poochie” energy… if you’re old and decrepit enough to remember that character’s arc on The Simpsons:
I can’t imagine how much of a dual-disaster a “Magi” search engine results page is going to be for
a) fans of a simple, clean layout, and
b) SEOs trying to rank for things.
I guess the age zero-click results is nigh, and the last 5 years have been a slow ramp toward death. Google clearly hates the fact that they have been citing sources and driving valuable traffic AWAY from their platform.
And just to be super clear, I’m not much of a “THIS IS THE DEATH OF SEO READ MY ARTICLE RIGHT NOW…” — I’m more of a “welp it was good while it lasted but in the end this universe is an entropy machine that chews everything up and scatters the molecules that made you and everyone you ever loved up out into the cold, cold, empty, cold universe” and being an SEO had to end eventually…
I hesitated to write about this topic today, since it’s so close in tone to my “the future of SEO in a post-ChatGPT world” but… you know. This is where things seem to be headed.
Don’t shoot the messenger (unless it’s with a T-shirt cannon. Everyone loves a fucking T-shirt shot out of a cannon) but you should probably have a plan for your website-that-relies-on-organic-search to thrive in this weird new… TikTok/ChatGPT New-Coke-Energy search engine that Google is looking to become.
Me? I probably won’t do much until it’s obvious what I need to do (and my traffic goes down in the mean time) or just, like… learn how to be an AI prompt engineer or an AI Concierge or some job that doesn’t exist yet…
What are your thoughts? Sound-off in the comments, lets get this newsletter some engagement already.
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Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey
sem@hey.com
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Google's entire business model relies on web publishers allowing them to scrape their content for free.
So does ChatGPT's.
If the incentive for web publishers (deh monies, bebe) to participate in this symbiotic relationship with Google (chatGPT is just a large leeching a/c) is removed then I can see publishers developing some very simple tech that prevents Google or ChatGPT from scraping their content and maybe looking at some kind of direct sponsorship model.
Or simply moving away from publishing on the web as we know it. Because Google doesn't own the Internet, it only has a monopoly there. And market monopolies are like Empires - they always fall apart.
Without web publishers, all tools based on ChatGPT become instantly useless and pointless, and Google simply has no reason to exist.
The only way human content can be replaced is by a General AI and we are *at least* 15 - 30 years from that becoming a reality.
But I do agree that web publishers need to shift their focus away from Google, which might even be to embrace a brand new search engine that appears to replace Google.