2021

Yearly Archives

  • How to Make Google Assistant More Useful

    Most of Google’s mobile apps and services are connected to the AI-driven Google Assistant service in some way, as are dozens of the most popular non-Google Android apps. You can use the Google Assistant to automate a wide range of connected tasks, such as to call, text, or email someone from your contacts list; retrieve […]

  • How Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) Will Change Search

    Whereas the BERT algorithm was designed to answer simple questions by processing many small samples of natural language text content, the Multitask Unified Model (MUM)—which Google claims is 1000 times more powerful—was designed to answer complex questions through a technique known as transfer learning. This means that MUM works at a higher level, relying on […]

  • Searching With Partial Information

    Sometimes you know what you’re looking for, but you don’t know what it’s called or even how to accurately translate what you know about it into a relevant search query. When that happens, here are some options: Use a Wildcard For an Unknown Word The asterisk (or star) character acts as a wildcard, which represents […]

  • SERP Special Features

    Websites that implement Google-compliant structured data elements may have one or more interesting special features in search results. Because they contain unique visual elements that stand out from normal results, and because they can appear in different places on the SERP, searchers are much more likely to look at results with these special features before […]

  • What Google Knows About You

    In 2016, Princeton University conducted a large-scale study on online tracking, and concluded that at least 75% of all websites contain tracking code used by Google, mostly for the AdSense and Analytics services. That doesn’t include the various other similar trackers used by social media sites, marketing companies, and online merchants. Even if you don’t […]