Podcast Summary: The Future of Search

This podcast discusses the evolution of search and how it is being impacted by the rise of AI and conversational interfaces. The key points covered include:

  • The changing nature of search, with search results moving beyond the traditional "10 blue links" to include richer media and AI-generated content.
  • The dominance of Google in the search market and the reasons behind its success.
  • The shift in user behaviour towards more conversational and contextual search experiences, driven by the emergence of tools like ChatGPT.
  • The continued importance of SEO, but with a need to adapt to the changing search landscape, including the impact of AI-powered search results.
  • The implications of the demise of third-party cookies and the importance of leveraging first-party data for marketers.
  • The potential impact of AI on the marketing profession, with AI seen as a productivity-enhancing tool rather than a replacement for human creativity and strategic thinking.

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated

Announcer (00:00):
This is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, exploring the future of search/

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (00:05):
One thing that is definitely changing is the user's behaviour in a lot of cases, rather than have a follow-up query and keep going back to Google for a follow-up, I'd rather just have a conversation where what I'm interacting with is remembering everything that I say and I can build on the last question and I can go back and forth and I can stay in one environment.

Announcer (00:25):
From Cambridge Marketing College, this is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast.

Kiran Kapur (host) (00:30):
Hello and welcome. We are in the world of search and specifically how search is going to change in the future, and I'm delighted to welcome Paris Childress, who is the founder and CEO of Hop online, a digital marketing agency based in Bulgaria and also the host of his own podcast. Paris Talks Marketing. Paris, welcome. Let's start with a very simple question. Can you define search for me before we get into the future of it?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (00:57):
Sure. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on the show, Kiran. I would define search as a web-based function that allows people to quickly find the information that they need and then move on quickly from there.

Kiran Kapur (host) (01:13):
And search has changed a lot over the years, hasn't it? I mean, I remember the sort of clunkier days of internet searching.

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (01:21):
Oh yeah, it has evolved quite a lot. When you think about Google, where it started, it was mostly the so-called 10 blue links, but now most of the search result pages have much richer information on it. You have images and video thumbnails. Of course you have a lot of ads now on a lot of these search result pages. So the classic organic results of the 10 blue links, it's becoming more rare that you ever even really see that on a search result page.

Kiran Kapur (host) (01:52):
Yes, it's quite interesting. There are different search engines. We always, always default back to Google, but how do the other search engines differ?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (02:01):
I think that Microsoft's search engine Bing is still number two. You have DuckDuckGo and then you have a few others. I think the reason that Google has dominated search for practically the last 20 years is they have a superior algorithm for ranking pages. I think they've always maintained the best relevancy and the best user experience. It's interesting how search became a winner take all type of a market. We haven't really seen any other player with significant market share almost ever in search other than Google. But they obsessed about speed, the user experience, and the quality of the search results. And that's been their bread and butter since the very beginning, and I still think that they're still winning in those areas.

Kiran Kapur (host) (02:54):
Yes, I'm a great DuckDuckGo fan. It's a very, very small area of the search market.

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (02:59):
Well, why do you choose DuckDockGo.

Kiran Kapur (host) (03:01):
Less tracking! It's as simple as that. It's just less tracking and I feel a little bit more like I'm not being tracked and I'm not being watched. But I believe in fact, they use the Google search algorithm anyway, so you tend to get the same as you would get if you went via Google as I understand it. So search has changed. I'm intrigued by, at the moment we all worry about SEOing our websites and getting to the top of the rankings. Is that something you still see us needing to do or is that something you think is going to start changing?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (03:35):
I think that is absolutely something that people need to keep doing, but the methods of doing that are going to evolve. And if you actually just look year over year, Google progressively over the last several years, they send more search traffic than they have the year before. Regardless of how people are talking about how things are changing and SEO is dying. I don't think it's dying at all. I think it is evolving. I also do think because of the new experiences such as Chat GPT and generative AI experiences, including what Google is doing in response to that, which is building their own AI overviews into their own search results. I think all of that is resulting in a trend of less people clicking through search results and it will be less traffic for websites. And I think that websites need to, certain websites, especially the ones that get a lot of traffic from Information rich pages, I think a lot of those information based queries are going to stop sending as much traffic and those websites will see potentially a decline in organic search traffic. But that's no reason to stop doing SEO. SEO is still very, very important. And actually the same basic rules around SEO are going to apply for Chat GPT and generative AI experiences as well, which is having great information, citing your sources, having good links, being trustworthy, all that stuff. It's still very, very important. So the SEO playbook is actually still is now the AI optimization playbook as well.

Kiran Kapur (host) (05:29):
Okay. Before we get onto the AI side, you talked about information based queries. So what does that mean?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (05:38):
Well, typically you have three types of search intent. One is navigational. So I would just type into Google the name of a website because maybe I'm not sure how to spell it or I don't know the exact URL address, but my intent is to navigate directly to a website or even to a business that is one clear type of intent navigational. The second would be commercial intent, which means I'm intending to find something and buy something or I'm in a shopping purchasing mode and the last type of intent is informational intent. That's where I want to be informed. I want to learn something and I need to get information. And that third type, which by the way is probably the least monetizable for Google. Google mostly monetizes through Google Ads commercial intent type of searches, which is why I think Google's revenue is still going to be fine even as informational queries are going to migrate over to Chat GPT and other experiences like that.

(06:45):
But informational intent is typically over the last 10 or 15 years has been served by websites and blogs and information sites, and they have been getting lots and lots of traffic for providing good information. Now I think that that information is going to be scraped by these large language models and served up in chat conversations, which is not going to result in traffic to those websites. But those sites still do need to provide that information so that they can be cited and their brands can still appear in those chat conversations. So I still think it's important for an information site to still invest in great content.

Kiran Kapur (host) (07:28):
That's really interesting. So you also mentioned being trustworthy, and clearly that's going to be, I mean I can imagine as AI continues, I mean already one is looking at stuff that comes back from search or things that you see and go, is that true or has that been, is that fake? Has it been generated? So how do you stay being a trustworthy site?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (07:49):
Yeah, there is an acronym that Google has been touting for a few years now, and it is EEAT. The last T is trustworthiness. The first E is experience, the second E is expertise. The third is Authority, and the last is trustworthiness. So rather than go through all of them, I'll focus on the trustworthiness part. I think the key for Google in establishing trust is looking at the websites that vouch for you and give you credibility via the links that they provide or citations or references, but primarily links. I think links are the strongest signal of trust and they still are around the web. So if I'm getting a link from the New York Times or if I'm getting a link from let's say a major university, that is a very big sign of trust. So these signals are very, very important for Google in establishing trust.

Kiran Kapur (host) (08:57):
That's interesting. And I can see that that's going to become, it is already important or will continue to be. So let's talk about how AI is going to change search. I mean, it's already starting to change search. You already have AI generated things at the top of your Google or even Duck Go. How do you think that is going to change things?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (09:16):
I think a lot of people are going to start moving from classic search engines like Google to large language models and chat experiences like Chat GPT. I think it has already started. We're still in an early adopter phase, so I don't think that this has achieved anything close to critical mass yet. But I do think it's going to happen and Google is also going to be a player in this game because Google has now created these AI overviews, which is kind of like an interactive chat experience. Well, it is an interactive chat experience that sits on top of the classic search results. So Google is trying to merge this new chat experience with its classic search results. So Google is coming at it from that angle. Chat GPT is trying to also merge its new Chat GPT search engine with their foundation, which is the chat experience.

(10:19):
So I do think everything is kind of starting to morph together, but one thing that is definitely changing is the user's behaviour. And I think in a lot of cases when I want to rather than have a follow-up query and keep going back to Google for follow-up searches, I'd rather just have a conversation where what I'm interacting with is remembering everything that I say and I can build on the last question and I can go back and forth and I can stay in one environment without having to go back and then go to different websites and go back to search. And that experience is now pretty clunky compared to a chat g PT like experience. So I think a lot of the informational search intent queries are going to shift into these chat experiences and it'll be very interesting to see how that evolves in the next couple of years. I do see it as a pretty significant threat to Google.

Kiran Kapur (host) (11:18):
Interesting. There's other things that are coming in that marketers also need to be aware of. So you talk quite a lot on your hop online website about the demise of third party cookies for example. What does that mean? Is that something else that I should be worried about? Should it keep me awake at night?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (11:35):
Well, no, not anymore. Google had been for years forecasting that they were going to sunset third party cookies, which third party cookies are little pixels that live in your browser and they allow these big ad companies like Google and others to track all of your activity as you browse the web. And that provides an amazingly powerful signal for how advertisers can target you. And that has really been one of the main drivers of the return on ad spend that you get when you do invest money in Google ads. And because of privacy concerns, Google had been forecasting that they were going to sunset third party cookies and transition to other type of tracking solutions. But a few months ago they actually announced that they reversed that decision and they're no longer going to be sunsetting third party cookies. Maybe the reason for that is they felt that the initial pressure that was on them to do so was no longer there and they figured out a way to navigate that situation and still retain third party cookies.

(12:49):
So I think it's a win for Google. It still means that the third party cookies are not really the most privacy centric way for users. But I think Google just made the calculated formula that probably said, well, still most users are willing to trade off a little bit of their privacy to get great search results and to get great highly relevant ads that target them around the web and in their Gmail inbox. So we're going to stick with third party cookies. So long story short, and I had been really touting first party data as the solution when third party cookies go away, I still think it's very, very important to invest in first party data solutions. First party data is all the data that you control throughout your entire tech stack, your marketing tech stack, that can be your email lists, it can be all the data in your CRM on your marketing automation platform. And I think it's still a very good idea to share the first party data with Google and with Google ads so that Google can further optimise beyond third party cookies. So that is in a nutshell, there's nothing to really worry about anymore about third party cookies going away, but the answer to that, which is supplementing the loss of third party cookie data with first party data, I think is still a very, very good idea for marketers

Kiran Kapur (host) (14:20):
Anyway. You would recommend that marketers did that for their first party data. What do you recommend that marketers do?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (14:26):
I think we work with a lot of B2B marketers who their primary goal is lead generation. And I think that one of the best ways to use first party data to improve lead generation to get more leads at a lower cost per lead and higher quality leads is to leverage the data in your CRM. And that could be as simple as if you're using, say, HubSpot as a CRM, you can connect that. You can connect your HubSpot data with Google ads and Google can see and start to optimise. Its bidding based on the revenue that it sees in your sales pipeline. So when Google gets that actual revenue signal, then it can start optimising for what's called a target return on ad spend, which is one of the methods of what so-called bidding. So if Google's goal used to be to just generate as many leads as possible for whatever budget you give it, it's not focused on quality, it's focused entirely on volume.

(15:27):
If we give it revenue data from the CRM, which is your first party data, then you can actually retrain Google to bid according to what is going to bring the most revenue, what is going to result in higher revenues in that sales pipeline in your CRM. So there you can pivot towards quality towards trying to tell Google, I want to get a target return on ad spend of maybe 200% or something like that. And when we've done this with our clients, it results sometimes in fewer leads but in much higher quality leads. And that's usually what people want.

Kiran Kapur (host) (16:03):
Yes, it's interesting. As soon as you do anything that tends to give you less leads, people start to panic. But actually, if the lead quality is higher, then that's the important bit. But it can be quite hard sometimes internally to explain that that's what you've done and that's why suddenly the leads this month look a lot lower, but it is an important thing to do. The other thing that your website talked about, which absolutely fascinated me because I'd never come across the term before. You talk about 'under and over indexing bloat', which is a fantastic phrase. What does it mean?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (16:34):
Yeah, it is a great phrase. 'Indexation bloat'. This is in the world of SEO - search engine optimization. And when Google comes to a website, it sends its crawler, its spider to crawl all the pages and to try to discover all the content. And based on what Google can see when it crawls, it has to make a decision of which pages it's going to include in its index. And the index is kind of like a big card catalogue and you need to have pages in that index in order to appear in search results. And in some cases Google over indexes a website, which we refer to as indexation bloat, but that means that you're showing Google too many pages that don't really belong in search results. Let's say you have an e-commerce website and you have a different page for every shoe size or every colour of an item or every variant, when somebody goes in and filters, you're creating a new page and you're asking Google to crawl into index, all those different page variants when all you really need to show in the search results is maybe the most basic page of the generic page for that.

(17:49):
And when users get there, they can adjust the filters, pick a size, pick the right colour or whatever else. That's an example of indexation bloat. And when you do that, you prevent Google from crawling and indexing other pages on your website, which might be more important and higher priority to be appearing in search results. So managing Google's indexation of your pages is very, very important for SEO, you can be over-indexed, you can be under indexed, which is the opposite challenge, which is Google is not discovering enough of your pages and you need to take steps to improve and increase the indexation.

Kiran Kapur (host) (18:31):
Is the solution to that, the sort of standard SEO techniques that one uses, it's just making certain that it's understanding whether you are under or over indexed and working out and then you can correct it. Is it simple as that?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (18:45):
Yeah, usually it is. And you work with things like site maps and the robots txt file, which is a very clear directive telling Google don't crawl these specific pages or these sections of my website, and this all happens in Google search console. And that is the number one tool, the number one platform for managing really how Google sees crawls and indexes your content on your website.

Kiran Kapur (host) (19:15):
Fantastic. Thank you. That was very clear. Thank you. I want to know if marketers should be excited or scared about AI. Is it something that we should just be embracing? Is it going to be, I mean you said it's early adopter stage. Is it actually going to do the famous cross the chasm? Is it going to disappear or is it going to continue? What's your feeling?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (19:36):
I think marketers should be very excited as I am about AI. And the main reason is that it drives a massive improvement in productivity. And I've seen this, I experienced this now on a daily basis using, I use a cross section of tools, but mostly Chat GPT. I'm starting to use Gemini a little bit more in anthropic and everything from strategic tasks and using AI as a strategic thought partner all the way to the more mundane, more manual tasks that now I can automate. So maybe I can give it a spreadsheet and tell it to extract certain data from that spreadsheet or data from an image or a PDF file. I am feeling and experiencing massive productivity gains from this, and I don't feel as though I'm going to be replaced. And I think that's the other side of the argument is that is this going to replace marketers jobs?

(20:38):
I think it will replace a lot of the manual tasks, but I think that there will always be a role for the creative work and the strategic work of marketing. So I do think that the marketers today that may spend a lot of time on manual tasks, I think it's going to take those tasks off of their plate and it's going to empower them with more productivity so that they can focus more on strategic work and on creative work. And I think that's going to allow them to provide more value to their companies and to their clients.

Kiran Kapur (host) (21:10):
So I'm intrigued. You mentioned, because I think most of the marketers I speak to tend to be using it for things like summaries or search or finding things or a basic first draught of something to help. But you talked about using AI to strategic thought partner. How do you do that?

Paris Childress, Hop Online Ltd (21:26):
This is when I go in and ask more open-ended questions. For example, I'll say, give me a comprehensive go-to market strategy for this new solution we're working on now called HOP AI Recruit, which is an AI assistant or an AI chatbot solution for student recruitment. And it can give me, and I use actually the version oh one, the model oh one of chat gt, which has more advanced reasoning capabilities. It can give an entire structure of to say, alright, these are the types of ideal customer profiles you should be thinking about targeting. Here's a complete content marketing strategy. These are some paid channels that you can consider working on. These are partnership opportunities, affiliate opportunities, and it will actually give me an outline of complete comprehensive strategic outline for a go-to market strategy. So I think just still people are not yet maybe trusting enough to ask such questions. The more that I see these types of answers, the more impressed I'm getting and the more confidence I'm getting in using chat g pt, particularly as a thought partner, a daily thought partner just to bounce ideas off of, brainstorm and even ask for strategic outputs.

Kiran Kapur (host) (22:51):
That's very interesting. Thank you for that. Paris Childress found and CEO of Hop online and host of an extremely good podcast, I have to say, called 'Paris Talks Marketing'. Thank you very much indeed for your time and for your expertise. That was extremely interesting. Thank you.

Announcer (23:08):
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