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The Helpful Content Update wasn’t about the content and the hope of recovery wasn’t about to happen. Web publishes hit by the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 who attended Google’s Web Creator Summit at the Googleplex this week were told the hope they’d held for seeing their rankings recover were likely in vain and that those placements were gone and not likely coming back. Oh, and it wasn’t about the content. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the disappointment and what disappointed publishers might do. They also talk about how Google has rolled AI Overviews out to over 100 countries, how Google is looking at similarity of content across websites, the no-data bug in GSC, SearchGTP, and the costs to Microsoft of growth through the development OpenAI. The show also looks at a number of pre-election issues and laughs about the 20 decillion dollar decision the Russian courts have leveled against Google. A fun news banter sort of show.

RedCircle: https://redcircle.com/shows/webcology/ep/c74a9004-bc54-4016-a13f-2096a3866e27

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-helpfully-no-roads-lead-to-recovery-edition/id280183059?i=1000676238777

I <3 Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/220-webcology-25817178/episode/the-helpfully-no-roads-lead-to-236317226/

Jono Alderson is a well known SEO Consultant, one of the top WordPress contributors, and a bonafide Digital Superstar. He joined Jim and Kristine to fill us in on the backstory and implications of the ongoing drama in the world of WordPress. Jono has been around for a long time. He knows where the bodies are buried and in this interview, he explains how it unfolded to get to where we’re at now. 

RedCircle: https://redcircle.com/shows/webcology/ep/37dc6a8b-8cdd-4005-a594-0e10a9562f67

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/webcology-extra-the-fork-in-the-road-at-wordpress-edition/id280183059?i=1000676995559

I <3 Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/220-webcology-25817178/episode/webcology-extra-the-fork-in-the-238438945/

A busy, news heavy show has hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger cover three major stories, each of which could occupy a full hour long show. The WordPress mega-drama continues with the founder’s faction at Automattic grabbing control of one of their rival WP-Engine’s best known custom WP-Contributions, Advanced Custom Fields in a forking incident many think close to theft. Also this week, leading SEO and Digital Marketing Tool Maker, SEMrush acquired one of the industry’s leading information resources when it purchased Third Door Media. Third Door publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and also organizes the Search Marketing Expo series of conferences. Meanwhile, Google is replacing it head of search, Prabhaker Raghaven with long time Google executive and Raghaven assistant Nick Fox who becomes head of Google’s Knowledge and Information division. Bing is pulling back on several under used features shown on its search results page while both it and Google move to publish full recipes in search results, denying the original writer’s a click. Over to our nuclear energy desk it seems that Amazon and Google are also entering the elite nuclear powered corporation category, joining Microsoft in making deals with commercial nuclear energy produces, developing their own small-scale nuclear generation capacities, or buying and refurbishing mothballed reactors such as the Three Mile Island plant. We also share a week’s worth of Google information, updates, and explanations.

RedCircle: https://redcircle.com/shows/webcology/ep/6dcedd12-5f86-4e16-bc1c-f2fb81b50d50

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-acquisitive-conglomerations-of-autumn-edition/id280183059?i=1000674168396

I <3 Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/220-webcology-25817178/episode/the-acquisitive-conglomerations-of-autumn-edition-230484678/

A war is being waged in the deepest heart of the Open Source movement for that movement’s very soul. Last week, Matt Mullenweg, the original founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, laid down his version of the law by banning WPEngine from the greater WordPress environment. The dispute centers around money and time contributed to the collective which provides the engineering for WordPress. From Mullenweg’s perspective, WPEngine has contributed too little of either after extracting hundreds of millions in revenues over the years. From WPEngine’s perspective, “WTF eh?” Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to make sense of a fight that threatens the web’s very understanding of what Open Source means. Meanwhile, Sam Altman has pushed OpenAI away from being a non-profit to being a for-profit benefit organization with Altman enjoying a 7% stake in the newly constituted company. This has pushed several key figures at OpenAI, including CTO Mira Murati and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew to resign in the past week. In other news, Google has killed its helpful Cache feature while updating its Web Search Spam policies. Google also reported and is fixing a noindex bug that caused several JavaScript driven pages to be indexed when Google couldn’t read the protocol. The show covered a lot more Google news in what was a busy post-COVID show after Jim caught and was sidelined last week by his first (and hopefully last) bout with the virus.

RedCircle: https://redcircle.com/shows/webcology/ep/e15b4325-daa7-453d-824c-6918828d5c98

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wtfpress-edition/id280183059?i=1000671427705

I <3 Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/220-webcology-25817178/episode/the-wtfpress-edition-222450874/

So it seems that anyone who’s anyone has an anti-trust suit or some other major legal challenge taking place, especially if you’re with Apple or Google. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the various anti-trust cases covering two types of Googley advertising monopolies and a spiffy tax dodge scheme the EU’s angry with Apple and Google over. We also talk about the introduction of Gemini AI to Google’s productivity suite including the feature that can turn your notes into a generic podcast.

BTW, “Rutabaga”. That’s this week’s safe word that proves we’re real. Kristine introduces a story that suggests families should come up with safe words to combat AI loan scams in which the scammers run a short clip of a voice through AI to convince people’s parents to send them money. Twixter is leaving San Francisco and the right wing American propaganda network, Tenet Media is shuttered by the DOJ because they’re a front from Russian malfeasance. We also talk about a lot of Googley goodness including Martin Splitt’s declaration that no Exif Data was parsed to generate those search or image results, Google’s spam warnings about misuse of their Indexing API, the move from FID to INP, and how changing your heading hierarchy isn’t the massive fix you might think it is. Remember, rutabaga. Accept no substitutes.

RedCircle: https://redcircle.com/shows/webcology/ep/44397b20-6592-4a7c-a42d-a2a34d2248e0

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-who-ya-gonna-anti-trust-edition/id280183059?i=1000670080429

I <3 Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/220-webcology-25817178/episode/the-who-ya-gonna-anti-trust-edition-218034284/

Google announced a series of sudden changes that are coming, some as soon as they were unveiled, at Tuesday’s Google I/O conference held in Mountain View CA. Collected under an umbrella known as Gemini, these changes are more about using artificial intelligence to solidify Google’s role as a lifestyle ecosystem provider for its billions of users than they are about search. Tuesday’s announcements complete a fundamental change in the utilization of Google’s original mission statement, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”, in which Google is going to focus on the useful part as much or more than it is on the accessible bit. For me, the most important part of yesterday’s stage show seems to have gone unnoticed and unmentioned. Google stopped trying to be a general search engine when it caught its latest whiff of its long time holy grail, complete data-personalization. Google isn’t about the world’s information anymore. As of today, it’s all about yours.

What is data?

Two days ago, data was a term describing a bucket of information about something or somethings. Today, at least in the context of Google’s emerging personal ecosystem, data is a term synonymous with oil. Data is everything and in a digital world of symmetry and motion, all data must be described, annotated, and tagged so it is instantly and consistently easy to understand. Data has always been Google’s lifeblood and securing, sorting, and serving it to an information hungry world has always been how Google and other search engines operate. Gemini is different in that it uses several AI processes to make that data useful in ways that are both brilliant and baffling at the same time. 

The brilliant parts should be obvious to anyone with a curious mind. If you can think of it and describe it, there’s a fair chance a Gemini infused set of tools can reproduce it. If the string of artists, writers, developers, department heads, and C-level hype-o-matic types who introduced and explained each subset of capabilities are to be believed, we’re talking about everything from written words to mathematical problem solving to complex artistic compositions and more. Gemini is really freaking awesome and it will eliminate a lot of the drudge work that goes into a lot of our professional and personal processes. Unfortunately, to do so it will also eliminate a lot of the work described as drudgery by people who do it to pay their rent, debts, and bills.  

And that, of course, is where we find the baffling part. Once you go beyond the wonders of the natural world, and I need to assure you we are so far beyond that it’s virtually indescribable to everyone except Minecraft enthusiasts, all data is created by people. Nearly everything Gemini previously ever trained on was made by humans. As of yesterday, we very honestly don’t know if something is truly authentic, authentic but augmented (ala autotune), or entirely artificial artistry. Moreover, when creative people start using the vast array of time bending tools made available, and realize how staggeringly powerful the new tools are (even for lower cost applications), let’s say it’ll be increasingly hard to find creative works that weren’t somehow enhanced or even entirely performed by AI. At this point I’d like to stop so I can ask you a terrible question. “Have you ever watched a snake destroy itself by swallowing its own tail?”

Think about the snake for a few minutes because it’s an easily made metaphor when one understands how most AI models work. The thing is, Gemini is more than most AI models. Gemini uses every connective device in Alphabet’s soup to understand the wants, needs, and capacities of every one of its billions of users. Consider the Android device that runs the Chrome browser many readers will view this article on. That device knows so much more about you than you might be comfortable considering but you should. Right now, because, data. Data is everything and, as you well know, you yourself are everything, and that means you are data. Yummmmmm. 

There’s probably not a better time to tell you this but you need to know that privacy is dead. Really really dead. It’s not sort of being abused by nice but mildly abusive people. It is dead. Doornailed, coffinbound, six feet under a pile of AI driven advertising, capital D dead. This is an important point to get past if you want to live in Star Trek. It’s also an important point to understand if you’re a business because, now more than ever, business is about deeply personal relationships and Gemini is, if anything, deeply personal. If you have a problem with this, ummm, you’re absolutely right in every one of your fears including the ones that are probably imaginary because generative AI is kinda like that. Let me tell you a short story about dominance. I promise it’ll have a snappy ending. 

Near the beginning of the Internet age, sometime around 1994 or 95, we worried about who controlled the operating system of personal computers because they who control the desktop control the overall experience. Microsoft had made its play for world dominance over a decade earlier by leasing rather than reselling the Disc-based Operating System (DOS) to IBM and building Windows on top of it to make DOS easily usable on every PC and knockoff evermore. Once MSDOS controlled the operating systems of what was then about 90% of the desktop computer market, it could introduce suites of its own products directly on the desktop and shun those of its competitors to the process of getting discovered. Microsoft still uses that heft in many ways, such as ChatGPTs reliance on the Edge browser but they are far more subtle after years of DOJ anti-trust involvement. To be clear, years of DOJ anti-trust involvement is likely in Google’s future as well but the keywords to these cases are often spelled in years so it’s unlikely this wave of change is going to be altered by the courts until after it’s taken place.

The important point to remember here is how much data Google is and has been able to collect about its individual users. One thing AI is really good at is analysing staggeringly large amounts of data and summarizing it succinctly so it is understandable and usable. You are that data. Your location and your shopping list and your search history and your purchase details and your banking information and your emails and the gamut of things you do while connected in the Alphabetverse provides that data. Since I wrote about it very recently, the fact that I personally enjoy old sharp cheddar cheese on stone-milled wheat crackers while drinking tea imported from India at my business address is 100% accurately part of that data, as is the location of the store I bought these lunch items at, and there’s not a thing I can do about it beyond opting out of the way I’ve learned to live modern life. After a decade and a half of living in and among the wilds of social media, I’m willing to bet on Star Trek but only because that privacy bubble was already past half burst and I at least want a better future from it but, given the timeline we live in, it is more likely we’ll become data-serfs than StarFleet ensigns. How we live and work with information is how we understand and interpret reality so the coming months are perhaps among the most important times in human history. No pressure eh?

So, let’s look at how Gemini is going to help us better understand, interpret, and work with information. Starting today throughout the United States and rolling out to over 200 countries by year’s end, AI Overviews will summarize certain types of search results based on the complexity of query and if Google thinks Gemini will provide a better answer than the traditional results sets might. The summary generated might be six or seven paragraphs long and be broken up with carousel-like sets of links to pages or products Gemini thinks would augment the user’s personal understanding or personal purchase journey. Those links might not appear to relate directly to text used in the summary which will be incredibly challenging and confusing for search marketers used to thinking in terms of keyword rankings. The Gemini twist to the generated result sets is that Gemini will perform secondary searches based on what it believes is the intention of a user’s search to produce references that might better fit what it has deduced the user actually wanted. This is why one might see results that would fall far below the traditional top10 placements surface in AI generative results. 

MultiStep Reasoning

Intention is an interesting thing. Gemini uses multistep reasoning to put together numerous elements it knows about an individual or gets from the way they structured their search query. In an example used yesterday at Google I/O, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, outlined her search for a popular yoga studio on her daily commute route offering a discount for new members that had classes that fit with her children’s school schedules. By entering a query that incorporated each need, a results set which included reviews, maps, well written descriptions of classes offered by different studios, along with business and pricing information was generated. The more complex the query, the greater the number of ways Gemini tries to find information to satisfy it, which is why everything is, by the necessity of being noticed, going to be reflected as data. 

Personal Feeding and Scheduling

There is so much information out there and over the years, Google has ridden webmasters to use structured data like schema markup and business owners to fill in the various fields in Google Business Profiles in order to digitally describe information relating to pretty much anything. Remembering our earlier example of looking for a yoga studio that fits within a number of location and time based parameters, imagine the possibilities of planning a nutritional schedule based around your work, chore, exercise and recreation times. You could be in completely different parts of your community at the same hour on different days yet still know where to purchase a nutritious meal, or where to buy ingredients to make one when you get home, if that fits your schedule. All that information is available across dozens of local websites and in the information your own Googleverse devices provide. The implication left on stage was, if Gemini can plan meals around extremely complex schedules and locations, perhaps it can organize other parts of our lives as well. Provided enough information by Google users and from the websites and apps representing local organizations, business, and institutions, perhaps it can. 

The Future of Web Services

For website owners and the businesses who provide web development services the future is going to be busy. There is a lot we can now do that we couldn’t do before and a lot more we can do with tools that will speed various development processes exponentially. Gemini will be able to help develop highly functional apps, assist developers in creating complicated code and problem solving, write highly credible first drafts of critical web copy, and perform thousands of tasks that would take tens of thousands of human hours to complete. It should be noted that artificial intelligence, while awfully smart, isn’t actually creative. While it can do incredibly complicated things and understands virtually any process outlined in a world full of training materials, AI is always repeating the most logical pattern based on what could be innumerable data inputs. AI can reduce the time it takes to do very big things by being able to quickly cope  with vast oceans of information. It can recognize and replicate and even intuit next steps in virtually any process as easily as it can figure out which words most logically follow to form a sentence similar to this one. 

The future of web services is doing more with stronger tools. The function of web sites is likely to change but it’s hard to see their role of providing information to web users going away any time soon. New tools will make it easier for many business owners to provide web services to their own businesses, however, as all business owners know, specialists tend to achieve far better outcomes than DIY projects do. Web service specialists will need to incorporate AI tools into their workspaces in order to keep up with increased levels of client wants and needs. The bottom line is, someone needs to know how all this stuff works and, as seemingly intelligent as artificial intelligence is, AI is not a business owner and can not possess the entrepreneurial vision or passion to make a business succeed. The future of many web service providers is probably strong but the learning curve of knowledge needed to stay relevant has increased exponentially. 

Ultimately, there might not be as many futures in web services as many current developer jobs might go the way of the file clerk and of the dodos before them. That said, there is an equal chance that with the extended powers of creativity and analysis available, new fields requiring web service skill sets will emerge. History tends to prove innovation creates new fields of employment even as it cuts like a knife through others. 

One thing we do know for certain is that a new arms race has opened between Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Adobe, and a few other big houses in the digital space. AI is everywhere and data is everything and the things that will rock your world moving forward will be, in large part, cultivated from the worlds you create in your daily interactions within and outside of the Googleverse. It’s not entirely Star Trek’s utopia yet it’s not entirely dystopian either. Let’s hope the various tech houses define this race by how AI can help humanity rather than how AI can capitalize on humanity’s needs. The future, as we once knew it, is now far behind us. Let’s hope the future in front of us is friendly.