SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

Google’s “Best Guess”

Google very quietly launched a new little feature in the SERPs recently, the search engine now gives its ‘Best Guess” at any commonly agreed information.

Look at the example below for a Google search on a upcoming computer game called “Duke Nukem Forever”:

Searching the game’s name plus the words “release date” sparks off the new guessing feature, I recommend you give it a try for computer games, movies and albums.

Most upcoming releases don’t yet show in Google’s search results and ones that do are mentioned from only reputable sources such as magazine sites, newspaper websites and Wikipedia.  As with many news features, Google seems to be slowly rolling this one out and is playing things out very safely.

So what will be guessed in the future? Will we start seeing guessed train and flight times soon or even something as extreme as guessed future election results?!

And does the wisdom of many always provide the best results? Medical and scientific textbooks get re-written every year with better ways to do things or new factual information, could a best guess hold on to the old facts and not the new?  Also if one magazine reports that a new movie is out on a certain date then many other magazines may copy the same information, this one piece of info which could be wrong would then be a “best guess”.

There are many questions about how Google’s guessing feature will pan out in the future. Facebook’s creator Mark Zuckerberg also is working on ways to predict the personal futures of Facebook users such as when someone is likely to break up with their partner.  Looking at analytical data to monitor sudden changes of behavior on Facebook can indicate when a relationship may end, in turn this data can be used to serve up more targeted ads and dramatically increase revenues.

Own a website? Why not see our conversion optimisation tips to take the guessing out of selling online…

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