Month: August 2017

The Sun has picked up on that Google is using the audio we all provide every day into Android phones, to tune and refine the Audio search algorithm

Quoted:

If you own an Android phone, it’s likely that you’ve used Google’s Assistant, which is similar to Apple’s Siri.

Google says it only turns on and begins recording when you utter the words “OK Google”.

But a Sun investigation has found that the virtual assistant is a little hard of hearing.

In some cases, just saying “OK” in conversation prompted it to switch on your phone and record around 20 seconds of audio.

It regularly switches on the microphone as you go about your day-to-day activities, none the wiser.

The Silicon Valley giant states on its terms and conditions that it keeps these recordings for “improving speech recognition against all Google products that use your voice”.

After the Sun Online presented examples of the voice recognition flaws to Google, a spokesman said: “We only process voice searches after the phone believes the hot word ‘OK Google’ is detected. Audio snippets are used by Google to improve the quality of speech recognition across Search.”

You may notice the prominence in your own daily searches of new suggested search terms like “Near Me”, “nearby” “in my neighborhood”.  You might have also noticed search results with titles in the links that are illustrative of a voice search being used.  Such as “the best in Austin”, “top consultant in Austin” and the like.  That is Google Hummingbird‘s work.

Google is well known for using it’s users to tease out data points, and studying user behavior.  One could say that we users are taking part in this experiment, as we search away and peer our attention on the goings on all over the planet.

The Sun article has a handy tutorial in removing your Audio functions from Google, so that you are not being recorded.  This issue of defacto automated surveillance is going to have to be answered to the Market’s satisfaction, as more and more voice search is used by the likes of Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google’s Assistant.

A terrific breakdown of the impact of the Personalized Search was just posted at link-assistant.com
Go here to read the whole thing.

“What’s personalized search?

Personalized search results are the results a user sees in a search engine that aren’t just based on the traditional ranking factors (such as the relevance of the web pages to the search term or their authority), but also on the information that the search engine has about the user at the given time, such as their location, search history, demographics, or interests. Although widely debated, the purpose of personalized search is to increase the relevance of the results for the particular user.

Both Google and Bing (and hence Yahoo, too) are personalizing their search results, but Google seems to be doing it for a larger share of searches. Back in 2011, a small experiment showed that over 50% of Google searches were being personalized; that number has likely only gone up since.”

A key problem we SEO professionals have to work around, is that these Personalized Searches can give our clients a misconception of what is truly going on with their site’s rankings in their targeted Local Searches. Location has become such a factor in these rankings, that if your client is not aware that his search may not be an apples to apples comparison of his Target Customer, Customer Avatar, etc.

The recommendation in the excellent article is to use their Rank Tracker tool. I cannot speak to that. I use an extension that allows me to determine my location, and can then do searches simulating that my location is an apples to apples comparison to my client’s most likely prospect.

What is that free extension? Tweet me at twitter and I’ll happily share it with you, it works like a charm.