Back in 2013 Google stated that about 15% of all search inquires were completely unique, in a recent interview with Google employees they have reaffirmed that this number has stayed about the same every year since then.
With over a trillion searches every year, having over 15% of them be completely unique to anything that’s been search before is a pretty staggering number. This means Google has to continue to make an emphasis on how searches provide answers to whomever is searching.
With so many searches being completely different, this will more than likely lead to Google putting more of a focus on machine learning aided search for users. Definitely something that SEOs will want to take notes on as we could see a possible large shift in how algorithms rank specific sites according to search terms in the future.
In the interview Google stated:
There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new — which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources. While our search results will never be perfect, we’re as committed as always to preserving your trust and to ensuring our products continue to be useful for everyone.
Google also has a new project in the works, named ‘Project Owl’, which further help deliver the right content at the right time to users who make specific searches.
Google will strive to improve by allowing authoritative content to be preferred over other content and improving the answers that are delivered via suggested searches and featured snippets.
The short of Project Owl can be summed up as:
- New feedback from search suggestions, also possible removal of certain suggestions
- Feedback forms for featured snippet answers and suggestions
- High emphasis on very authoritative content to be increase the quality of search and answers fed to the user
Essentially this news should be encouraging to SEOs and webmasters alike, as more and more searches are done every year, along with brand new searches popping up every day, SEO is not dead!