Shemeo Search News #01 - Gemini & more Google updates

It’s time to a big fat farewell to 2023. Finally.

As my finger trembles over ‘save’ on my out of office, and the festive Bucks Fizz starts to materialise in my mind, it’s time to round up the last few scraps of search news from Q4.

1) Gemini: Google’s next step into AI tech

Unlike other AI models out there, Gemini can outperform human experts on MMLU, or Massive Multitask Language Understanding.

So far, this makes it the first AI model of its kind (which is kind of cool).

What does it do?

The Deepmind Gemini homepage says:

“... [Gemini] gives you the potential to transform any type of input into any type of output”

It’s available in three different scales to tackle on-device and highly complex, multi-stage tasks.

Examples given by Google around what the AI model can achieve include generating combined text and image outputs, visual reasoning across different languages, and code generation.

Gemini Pro has now been integrated into the Bard chatbot which is still free to use, and it is available to be built into applications via Google Cloud Vortex AI and Google AI Studio.

A controversial launch

Unfortunately, the wow-factor of Gemini was squashed like an unwelcome bug.

There was controversy surrounding how Google chose to showcase the tech - with many claiming that their jazzed up mockup video pulled the wool over the public's eyes.

Google bit back. They said that although they made the chat appear more intuitive than it was by making out that the AI model was watching a live video stream, they had disclaimed that it was being fed a series of visual and text prompts.

2) Google Search Labs Introduces Notes

Google Notes is another Google Search Labs experiment that has raised a few eyebrows across the SEO community lately.

The idea of the Notes feature comes from Google’s drive to prioritise User Generated Content (UGC), which ties in with E-E-A-T improvements. It doesn’t impact rankings, and should work in the following way:

User completes a search query
User clicks the note button attached to a result
They are taken to a notes page that contains sticky-note like boxes where others have left helpful thoughts and opinions related to the results, where they can also contribute a note if they want to

This would be a really nice search addition in an ideal world, but there are (valid) concerns around how much this feature would be abused. It is the perfect place for spam and false information to thrive.

I don’t think it’ll make it to mainstream search anytime soon

This is one of those ideas that could be really nice.

But the question is - would anyone really use it in the long term? And would the resources needed to keep spam at bay outweigh the benefits of user generated content?

I can see it going downhill in the same way as the expert articles feature on LinkedIn. It was a good concept that has been completely overrun by nonsense.

Unfortunately, I live in the UK and have yet to invest in a VPN that will let me play around with search lab features, but from what other SEOs have shared, the Notes feature is pretty nonsensical right now.

Alongside helpful notes, users have been leaving random ‘test’ and lorem ipsum text in the note boxes, unhelpful 2010 Facebook level comments, and some rather unhinged sentiments, including:

People treating Goole like my grandma’s Facebook comments section = ‘I love garden season’, ‘I should buy a house with a big garden!!!!!’.
Testing the waters - ‘Test note’, ‘Lorem ipsum test’
Irrelevant, random one-worders - ‘Recipes’ (the search was about gardening)
Other people being… unhinged - ‘Gardening is better than murder’
…and this? - ‘meow meow meow, meow meow meow, meow meow meow’, ‘my ass hurts’

Above image collated using screenshots from these sources: Twitter | LinkedIn

3) Changes to how video content is ranked in search

Google has made a change to how it ranks videos, which is one I am 100% on board with.

What’s changed?

If a video is not perceived to be the ‘main content’ of a page, it won’t rank in video results.

To position your video as the main content, it should be above the fold of the page and positioned clearly.

Videos that are not the focus, for example, a video that is within an article, will be treated as supplementary or supporting content, and won’t be eligible to rank within the video results. Previously, I’ve seen too many instances of SEO’s embedding irrelevant videos into articles just to try and tick a box and earn a ranking that, frankly, their content doesn’t deserve.

YouTube provides the clearest, and most obvious, example of what main content videos should look like.

4) November’s core algo update

…finally ended after 26 days. Foul. I can’t remember an update taking this long since the 2022 December Helpful Content Update, which to be honest, I’d scrubbed from my mind until now.

Keeping it short and simple

Google got a little bit trigger happy on the updates in the last few months of 2023
The November Core Update was the latest, and ended on 28/11

There were peaks of volatility across the month that continued into early December.

Sports, News, Arts & Entertainment, Shopping, and Hobbies & Leisure categories experienced the most volatility.

Sports	8.9
News	7.8
Arts & Entertainment	7.0
Shopping	6.8
Hobbies & Leisure	6.0

Here is a little recap of core updates we saw across 2023

February 2023 product reviews update | February 21st - March 7th
March 2023 core update | March 15th - March 28th
April 2023 reviews update | April 12th - April 25th
August 2023 core update | August 22nd - September 7
September 2023 helpful content update | September 14th - September 27th
October 2023 spam update | October 4th - October 19th
October 2023 core update | October 5th - October 19th
November 2023 core update | November 2nd - November 28th
November 2023 reviews update | November 8th - December 6th

A full history can be found on the Google Search Status Dashboard.