#queryfiltering

#queryfiltering

Bets tend to appear in the 'For you' section of Google News, which is supposed to be tailored to a person's particular interests. Futurism notes that the platform actually placed a Polymarket bet as the top news result when inquiring about the price of Bitcoin.

Users can describe their restaurant needs, such as 'find a table for two at a dog-friendly Italian restaurant in Shoreditch for Saturday at 7PM.'

If I fast-forward, a lot of what are just information-seeking queries will be agentic in Search. You'll be completing tasks. You'll have many threads running.

Buyers no longer open ten tabs, skim through blog posts, and slowly form an opinion over weeks. Instead, they ask a single question to an AI system and receive a shortlist in return, usually two or three companies that feel familiar, credible, and safe enough to justify internally. That shortlist often becomes the entire market in the buyer's mind.

Voice search doesn't change people's need to search, but what does change is our need to pay attention to our audience's requirements and adapt our strategies to account for more than just 'money keywords'. The challenge that voice search throws at us is the advent of the single default answer. It's 'I'm Feeling Lucky' but on a wide, landscape-changing scale.

For most of the last two decades, SEO mostly meant one thing, where you ranked on Google (and occasionally Bing). The customer journey was familiar. Someone searched, scanned a list of links, clicked and explored. Now the journey is increasingly 'ask, get an answer, take action.' And the platforms shaping that journey include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google itself, which is inserting AI summaries, what Google calls AI Overviews, into search results.

Yahoo's big AI play is, in many ways, actually a return to the company's roots. Three decades ago, Yahoo was known as "Jerry's guide to the world wide web," and was designed as a sort of all-encompassing portal to help people find good stuff on an increasingly large, hard-to-parse internet. In the early aughts, the rise of web search more or less obviated that whole idea. But now, Yahoo thinks, we've come back around.

Several weeks after Google rolled out support for Preferred Sources globally, Google added official help documentation for site owners to use to help them understand what it is all about and how to encourage their readers to subscribe to your site as a preferred source. In December, Google rolled out Preferred sources globally after rolling it out in the US and India in August and beta testing it in June. Now the new help documentation is available here if you need it.