samcherry

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An Olympian Effort into User Friendly SERP User Interface (UI) Since its launch in May of this year it seems the much-anticipated Google Knowledge Graph tool has been sneakily seeping into our SERPs at a much slower pace than first forecast. The aim for the Knowledge Graph was to allow for a decreased search time for users. An amalgamation of images and information from across the web would appear on the right hand side of the SERPs allowing searchers to access rudimentary information without entering other websites. Saying that, it seems the Knowledge Graph for now (at least in the UK, the US have had a much more sudden increase) has been reserved only for the privileged elite, mainly brands. A comparison of the same search term, ‘Michelangelo’ in google.co.uk and google.com can be seen below. A UK search for anything to do with the Olympics on the other hand produces a completely different result altogether. The Knowledge Graph seems to come to life like never before and while brands in the UK can enjoy perhaps a couple of sentences of a brand bio, the Olympics enjoys a myriad of information panels. Google really has gone all out with its efforts for the Olympics, removing most of the reasons for searchers to view the official page at all. In terms of SERPs space, Google’s collated content now takes up 50% of the page taking up valuable advertising space. Our initial account of the Knowledge Graph produced two predictions as to how Google would benefit from the Knowledge Graph as a whole and it seems these predictions ring true for the Olympic efforts from the search engine: Firstly, our forecast on the Knowledge Graph aiding Google in its effort to become a fully-fledged digital version of the human brain has been further entrenched by its saturation of Olympic-related content. This is a fairly shrewd course of action for Google, as competitors, at least in the field of social media, have also been conducting labours into the notion of the, ‘walled garden’. For example, Facebook has made it very easy for users to engage with applications such as Pinterest but stay confined to the Facebook platform. In the same sense, Google users, with the help of their fully integrated Knowledge Graph interface, users will have the download free link to get Google for the information they seek. The second prediction as speculated in our previous article about Google’s Knowledge Graph is that the right hand SERPs fundamentally pushes the use of Google’s own social platform. The inclusion of the ‘latest post on Google+’ feature on the Olympic UI was inevitable but perhaps Google should be putting more effort into the amount of coverage loyal Google+ users receive on their SERPs. For example, massive hitters on the Google+ front such as Cadbury receive minimal content and information about its brand within the Knowledge Graph panel and what little coverage they do receive only appears as a result of a core search, ‘Cadbury’. Longtail searches such as ‘Cadbury Chocolate’ yield no result in terms of Knowledge Graph coverage.

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