After the recent announcements at the Google media conference in San Francisco, one of the exciting new features for loyal Google regulars is the voice search function. Speaking web searches is going to be a little alien (plus challenging) to most of us, simply because very few people have ever taken to speaking to computers.
Breaking a habit is one-thing the British seem less likely to achieve if Google is taken as an example. In the UK about 90% of us still use Google as our preferred search resource. In the US it’s down to 60 odd percent due to consumers moving to Bing and Yahoo.
Technology available today includes many fantastic tools for personal and business usage. Take for example voice recognition software- I personally use Dragon Voice Recognition for blogging and brain storming and find it simply stunning in functionality. But how many friends or colleagues do we know who talk about using these voice activated tools?
Here at iM3 we are not afraid of trying new things, as long as no-one is listening. Experiencing the Google voice search for the first time is a strange yet fun way of presenting a page of information.
Instead of typing the query string, simply click where you see the microphone (next to the character search facility). A Google bubble will appear and now you are on stage! Google say’s on the official voice search page to “speak your search query out loud”. We presume they want to minimise the opportunity for low volume resulting in poor quality search results.
Thinking from a search engine optimisers point of view, the original presumption that first set me off in the office yesterday was: ‘Will we still employ the same terminology when speaking out-loud?’.
Considerations for this argument, as I see it, are as follows:
- Are we more lazy or more active when speaking a search to Google?
- Speaking is easier and more fluid than typing for almost everyone
- Typing can take time for long-tail (more words involved) phrases
- If you make a mistake when typing, it’s a chore to change the query
- You can get carried away and can’t delete parts of a query when speaking
- This will change the search patterns enormously, adding thousands of new and random search strings to the keyword research SEO companies undertake.
Implications for SEO as far as I can see are simply key-phrase based. My Grandmother used to speak entirely differently depending on who was in the house. If the Vicar came around, it was the Queens finest English. If it was the rent collector the language was much more colourful. Will we use dissimilar and contrasting phrases depending on who is the office / lounge?
