15% of all searches on Google are still brand new

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Over the years, Google has frequently shared that a large percentage of the searches on their site are for phrases they’ve never seen before. This is heavily related to search queries getting longer, which I first talked about 13 years ago and continues to progress to this day. As of right now, 15% of all searches on Google are phrases they’ve never seen before.

The 15% stat is amazing to me on two levels.

  • First, it’s fascinating that Google can usually give fantastic results for something they’ve never seen before. They can take a brand new query, compare it to billions of possible results, sort them in the perfect order for that session, and do it all in a fraction of a second.
  • Secondly, though, is just how crazy it is that 15% of searches today are new. Google sees around 8.5B total searches every day, meaning there around 1.3B new searches every single day. This is after we know that Google has already seen somewhere around 30 trillion searches since 1998.

Google has seen 30 trillion search queries, and yet we still give it 1.3 billion new unique searches every single day.

This is also why we encourage our clients not to get too hung up on particular rankings. Sure, ranking well for an established keyword can do great things, and we don’t shy away from that.

However, our main goal with every client is to avoid confusing Google. When Google gets those 1.3B new queries each day, they immediately provide results to the searcher. The better Google can fully understand your site, the more times you’ll show up in those results.

(via Search Engine Roundtable)

Google being less transparent can be a good thing

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For decades, there have been calls for Google to be more transparent about how their search algorithm works. While it’d be essentially impossible to share because it’s so wildly complex, even if sharing was possible it might still be a bad idea.

In a recent Twitter poll, search engine experts were asked about the impact if Google were to be 100% transparent about its ranking factors, and the result was that it would be decidedly worse.

What I find particularly interesting is who voted in that poll. While we don’t have specifics, these are generally people that work all day long to try to find ways to help their clients rank higher on Google. If anyone, you’d think that they’d want to know the secrets. However, there are two big reasons they don’t:

  1. It might put them out of a job. Working to suss out the details of the Google algorithm is hard work, and that work would be meaningless if Google just laid it all out.
  2. More importantly, spammers would abuse it very heavily and it quickly would become overrun with garbage.

I’m always in favor of transparency when possible, but I think Google keeping their algorithm fairly close to the chest is a good thing for all of us.

(via SE Roundtable)

The cycle of simple

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I’ve noticed a pattern in a few areas of business that goes roughly like this:

Simple –> Complex –> Simple

Websites

The first place I’ve noticed this is with website design. When someone is just starting out, they build very simple sites. As their skills improve, they load websites up with more bells & whistles and various features. Finally, as they really understand the purpose of what they’re doing, the sites become more simple again so they can focus on the main thing. Simple, Complex, Simple.

Tech in Meetings

I’m also seeing this with tech in meetings, and this is a transformation I’m personally working on.

When you first start participating in meetings, you bring a notepad. Over time, you introduce a laptop, perhaps a mobile hotspot to keep connected, or maybe your iPad. All of those can be valuable in meetings, and I still use them at times, but whenever possible I’m going back to simpler tech (either a normal notepad or my reMarkable) so I can be more present in the meeting. Simple, Complex, Simple.

Focus

The factor that impacts both of those is focus.

If you’re building a website, the focus should be on the goal. Animations, sliders, and other eye-catching things might help reach that goal, but often pull focus away from where it should be.

In meetings, you’re often best when you can focus fully on the others in attendance. There are times when I need my laptop to pull up data or run slides, but eliminating that distraction whenever possible to create a deeper conversation is something I never regret.

The initial “simple” in the cycle is often naivete, but the the final “simple” is focus. Getting over the often unnecessary middle step of complexity will land you in a good place.

More data = less value

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Our agency is a big believer in data. We track website metrics, social media metrics, email marketing metrics, and pull in great tools like heatmaps to take things even further. However, a problem that can quickly arise is having too much data. It’s easy to build a giant report that shows everything, but the result of that is often that the key metrics get buried.

My friend Jake Albion recently put it this way on Facebook:

The biggest offenders tend to be digital marketing agencies and SEO agencies that send 100-page reports to their clients. It’s always a big red flag. Usually means it was outsourced by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing.

Experts know how to make things easy to understand, not harder.

It’s not unlike a famous quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter“. It takes work to refine a ton of data down into meaningful bits, but that work is essential.

In our case, we build custom dashboards that pull together the most meaningful metrics that our clients need to be aware of. We can certainly dig into the depths of Google Analytics as needed, but a 100-page report every month will simply be ignored.

Our dashboards work well, but really any method that you use to take lots of data and break it down is an excellent way to provide more value to those you serve.

Leave it better than you found it

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There are two main ways you can approach the internet:

  1. You can be patient and giving, contribute to the discourse, and leave it better than you found it.
  2. Work to squeeze every bit of value out of it and not worry about what’s left when you’re done.

Individuals likely have some granular levels between those, but businesses are often much more black and white. For example, I got an unsolicited message on a LinkedIn a few days ago that said the following:

Our team has launched (redacted), sales & prospecting automation software for Linkedin that allows you to not only automate connection requests and messages you send, but also create campaigns and build sales funnels on Linkedin.

“Automate connection requests and messages you send” — that’s not good. One of the growing problems with social media is noise from automation, and this tool is explicitly designed to do exactly that.

To show that they know what they’re really doing, their website touts various features that help you to be super careful to avoid LinkedIn’s monitoring and spam systems — because they know they’re doing a bad thing.

Making solid connections is getting more difficult than ever, and tools like this are only making it worse. The problem is that tools like this will temporarily make life a little better for those that use them, as it gives them a leg up, but it ultimately creates more noise and is leading LinkedIn (and the internet as a whole) in a bad direction.

Automation can be good

Automation can be a good thing. If you find a tool that helps you streamline your workflow, go for it! Computers and the internet can make many aspects of our life much easier, and that should be celebrated.

However, if the primary use of a tool is to reach more people, that’s just called spam. Even if it doesn’t make you look dumb (like Mountain View Ford), you’re still contributing to make the internet a worse experience for everyone.

When you go hiking or camping, you’re encouraged to leave things better than when you found them. We should strive to do the same online.

My sources for weather updates

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For roughly 300 days a year, the weather app on my phone is all I need. We live in Georgia, so temp and rain are really all I need to know about.

However, for a few months each year we have an outside chance of seeing some snow, which I love, so I pay a bit more attention to forecasts to see what might be coming our way. Here’s what I look at.

Most of what I look at is on the College of DuPage NEXLAB Forecast. They have tons of different tools on there, but there are really just two that I use.

The first is the GFS forecast, which goes roughly two weeks into the future. To get there, click on “GFS” at the top, optionally choose your region of the country, then click “Winter” in the left sidebar, then “24h Snow Accum.”.

When that screen loads, you can drag the green slider below the map to go forward in time and see what they’re predicting for the next few weeks. The example below is what I’m eyeballing for this Sunday, as we’re right on the edge of some pretty good snow!

The other that I like to look at is the NAM forecast, which is a short-term look that goes four days into the future. Choose “NAM” at the top of the page, and then the same options on the left to view the snow forecast. For us, it’s looking like this:

There are many other tools you can play with in there, but these are two of my favorites. It gets interesting when the two forecasts are quite different (as you’ll see above), but gives a decent idea of what you can potentially expect.

If you have other sources that you like to use, leave a comment and let me know.

Your eyes follow your mouse

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It seems pretty logical, and it is, but when someone is moving their mouse around their computer screen, their eyes tend to follow. A paper out of Carnegie Mellon University studied this to determine exactly how much a person’s eyes match their mouse movements. They found:

84% of the times that a region was visited by a mouse cursor, it was also visited by (users’) eye gaze. In addition, 88% of regions that were not gazed by the eye were also not visited by a mouse cursor.

It’s pretty clear that a user’s eyes will tend to follow their mouse. But why does this matter?

Tracking the mouse

When working to optimize your website, one thing you can do pretty easily is track the movement and clicks of a user’s mouse on your site to understand how they’re using it. For example, this page shows hotspots that have been clicked recently on the GreenMellen website.

Tracking user’s eye movements is essentially impossible without special equipment and testing, but if you can capture their mouse and show that it matches their eyes pretty closely, you have some rather solid data.

If you want to know exactly how people are using your website, you can run focus groups and do other testing to get a very good look at it. However, for a fraction of the price and effort you can use tools like heatmaps and be confident that the results are 80%+ the same as if you were able to track their eyes.

If you want to try this on your site, there are a lot of great tools out there that can help (we use one called CrazyEgg). If you need help sorting it out, reach out to us at GreenMellen and we can help point you in the right direction.

Expand your mind with Heyday

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While I use the native browser bookmarking tools a little bit, for years I’ve used various external tools to help keep sites organized. Right now I’m using Raindrop.io (which I first talked about a few years ago), and it does a pretty good job. It has a browser plugin to make it easy to add bookmarks to it, and has some nice features for organizing them.

However, there are a lot of new tools coming out lately to help with this, and one that caught my eye recently is heyday.xyz. The big thing that Heyday does is that it essentially saves your entire browsing history, along with other apps that you choose to connect to it (such as Slack and Email) and it will pull together what you need automatically.

Here is a good example from their site on how it augments a Google search result:

Privacy

I know what you’re thinking, and I agree — “they’re saving my full browsing history”? Yep. Here is their statement on that:

Unless we want to get sued, we will honor our privacy policy. It says that we will never sell your data or let someone use it to target you with ads. We make money by selling subscriptions. If we do something shady with your data, you will stop paying us. That would be bad. We also encrypt all your data in-transit and at rest so that you’re the only person who gets to see it.

That helps, but the entire concept is still a bit worrisome for me. I might be ok with it if it brings me enough value (most of our browsing is being tracked in one way or another already), but we’ll see if that turns out to be the case.

For now, I’m seeing two main things:

For surfacing old notes and sites, it’s great!

When I’m on a website, it’ll often have an icon “wave” at me and tell me about past visits and where I’ve made other notes about the site. If you click the little waving hand, it pulls in relevant content like this:

For finding specific bookmarks, it’s not so great.

You can pull up the site (or the app on Windows, Mac or iOS) and search through everything, but it’s messy. The messiness seems to be by design and may work, but I also usually like to have tidy folders for specific areas of interest. They have a “star” feature which is similar to a proper bookmark, but not quite the same.

I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but so far it’s been quite interesting. They have a free trial and then it’s $10/mo after that, so give it a try if you’re interested.

Your computer is way more powerful than you realize

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It’s a common saying to hear things like “We have more power in our phones than NASA did in the 1960’s to put a man on the moon” — and it’s right! If anything, it’s a huge understatement.

Rodney Brooks wrote a great article for IEEE Spectrum where he broke it all down, but his main comparison was a modern laptop compared to the IBM 7090, the first all-transistor mainframe, which cost around $20M in today’s dollars. The comparison?

A week of computing time on a modern laptop would take longer than the age of the universe on the 7090.

It’s not that we just have “more power” than NASA did back then, but we have more power than we can even begin to understand.

The 7090 was an amazing machine, with a single one often shared between an entire company or campus, but you can perform calculations roughly a quadrillion times faster (1,000,000,000,000,000) on your laptop. It’s really hard to understand a number that large, but Brooks’ comparison is pretty solid. Perhaps more mind-bogglingly, can you imagine what computers will be able to do in the next 60 years?

In the meantime, are you making good use of what you have in your hands today?

Places where I was late

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Generally speaking, I’m an early adopter of new media and technology. I like to try out new toys, mostly as entertainment under the guise of productivity.

Looking back, though, I see a few times when I was shockingly late to the game.

Podcasts

Two of my favorite new podcasts these days are The Office Ladies and Adam Grant’s WorkLife. I had listened to one episode of WorkLife a while ago and somehow it didn’t click, so I didn’t subscribe. That was a mistake. With The Office Ladies, I didn’t bother to understand how they were approaching it (a recap of one show per episode, in order) and now I love it! Both are podcasts that I don’t miss, and I feel silly for having missed them for so long.

Gaming

I got an Oculus Quest 2 (VR Headset) earlier this year, and feel like I’ve missed out a bit. Granted, the technology is just now getting to the point of being practical and affordable, but I still feel a bit late and wish I could have been playing games like Supernatural a whole lot earlier!

Related is the game Fortnite, which I jokingly call “the new golf course”, as I’m finding it a great place to hang out with my tech buddies and chat. 25% of the chat is tactical (“get your sniper rifle ready!”), but about 75% is just chatting about life and business during the slow parts of the game — pretty similar to a round of golf with a friend. I was certainly very late to trying out Fortnite.

Technology

While I’ve used a Kindle for years now, I certainly wasn’t an early adopter. I had some weak reasons for avoiding it, but it’s indispensable now. I still love a real book from time to time, but the convenience of the Kindle is tough to beat (and I really love my new Paperwhite).

Lastly is cell phones. While we all have them now, 25 years ago we didn’t. Among my peers, I was probably the last to get one in 2001 (my wife and many others were more in the ~1998 range). I just didn’t see the need, and I still don’t really use the cell phone to actually make calls, so that tracks pretty well.

Racing

Racing to the front of the line isn’t always a way to win, as you can waste a lot of money buying HD DVD players or putting many hours into Google+ (like I did), but it’s often fun to play those games to a degree.

What is something that you were slow to adopt and wish you had looked into earlier?