Search On ‘21 happened just recently, and it was aimed at getting people excited for upcoming Search-related features that would (hopefully) drive Search forward.
I think we all know that one of Google’s aims is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible.
Wildfires In Your Area?
Google announced their new Wildfire Layer. Basically, if there are wildfires in your area, then you can go to Google Maps and see the Wildfire Layer overlay, which basically lets you see the location and scope of major wildfires in your area and around the world.
The MUM AI Understands Information Across a Wide Range of Formats
MUM is one of Google’s AI iterations. It’s multimodal, meaning that it can understand information from a wide range of formats, such as video, images, and text.
In Lens, if you find an image of someone wearing a shirt with a pattern that you like, you can search for socs with that pattern (or as similar a pattern as Google can find).
As another example, let’s suppose you’re an artist or interested in acrylic painting.
With Refine This Search, you can get things like step-by-step instructions, materials needed, and techniques like puddle pouring.
Conversely, there’s Broaden This Search, which, as it’s name suggests, helps you to search more broadly. It can help you find things like puddle pouring designs.
When it comes to shopping, you can use Google Lens to find listings from shopping platforms.
Plus Codes: Probably Google’s Most Innovative Announcement Yet.
It some areas of the world, there are no physical addresses.
This can make it hard to participate in the economy or the global financial system.
Plus Codes is a free and open-source digital addressing system that brings international user addresses to more places around the world.
With Plus Codes came the announcement of Address Maker, which is a free smartphone app that helps governments and nonprofits create addresses for entire towns or villages.
So, these were the major announcements I noticed in the video above. Stay tuned to discover more about how these advancements can continue to shape how we, as digital maketers, approach what we do and how we can expand what we think of as SEO.
Source: Google YouTube channel