Episode 522: Algorithm Cataclysm: Google Announces Search Redesign Using MUM Algorithm by Roger Montti #522

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, I'm the secret of internet marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners here at EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm the lead strategist at EWR Digital with a new mic. The mic sounds very good. Does it sound good? It sounds very good. I got the light in my eyes again today, but yeah. Good thing you have the hat because now you can see. That's right. And people can see your face. Hey, this is just going to be a brief update. We wanted to get out there and talk about an algorithm cataclysm. We haven't done that in a while. It just doesn't happen like it used to. It did certainly in June and July. There was like the freaking world. Well, yeah, but they used to have like big announcements. It was more of a, I mean, there was a cataclysm, but it was not announced by Google as such. I mean, not that it's ever been announced as a cataclysm. It's a Fred. It's just all Freds. But this is different. This is Google announces search redesign using mum algorithm. Google announced a redesign of search, Google search that introduces an intuitive way to explore topics and surface more content with mum. And that's M-U-M. And that was earlier in 2021. It allows you to search across different things. MUM stands for Multitask Unified Model. You can probably teach a 101 course on how to like break that down. But the feature that Google is running with the most is the ability to search with images instead of just text. I've been doing Google Images search. They're just going to incorporate it more. I mean, Google image searches for quite some time. They're just going to incorporate it more. You don't have to go to like another search feature. Google has already announced that the integration of MUM into their Lens app is coming in the following months. And the other thing that it's going to change is really it's like extra questions,

right? What is that people also asked? Well, people also ask. I mean, we've been knowing that that's going to go away for a minute as well as like the incorporation of image search. They're trying to change how people search a little bit. But, yeah, people also ask is going away. Going away. And it's going to be replaced with potentially three things. So, one would be things to know, right? So, instead of Google, you know, other people ask, hey, there's other things you might want to know about, I don't know, whatever golf clubs. Next is topic zoom. So, that's going to allow you to like zoom. You can get more granular on a topic. Okay, so a golf club, you know, what about the grip or what about the head or the grooves on the head? Or you could get more macro, right? You could back out and you could say, you know, what's the origin of golf? Where did golf come from? So, that's going to be kind of in that same space. And then visually browsable search results, that's going to go to really like the images, right? So, you can actually see images and kind of go down that path. Well, it's kind of like Pinterest, right? I mean, to a degree, like you can click on an image and anything that's in that image, you can click on it more and see more what's going on, right? Yeah. I guess, because they, in this particular article, by the way, this was on Search Engine Journal. They only did, they showed like, it's kind of cool. They showed a video animation of what the things to know feature looks like. Pretty cool. Let's play it. Let's play it for those watching. Oh, yeah. You can pull that up. You got that article? You're going to pull that up? I got it. I got it. All right. Here we go. Yeah. And I will do the best I can describe it. So, it's a search result with a really knowledge graph and under it

where you might find people also asked, you are finding things to know. I thought there was a bigger animation there. All right. Nope. That was the animation. Let's do it again because it was so awesome. All right. By the way, if you're actually watching this, it probably means you're on YouTube. You should go ahead and subscribe and follow to make sure you stay up with all the algorithm cataclysms. And if you're listening to the podcast, this will be released with another one shortly. So, don't worry if you're feeling left out. Yeah. No, it was interesting. I think that there's a lot of this augmented reality that they're starting to come out with. And I'm even starting to see it carried in the stores. I know Facebook's trying to come out with something. I know Google Glasses, I think, was just probably too early. But I think, you know, Google's trying to index the whole world and how everything relates to each other. And that's a lot of kind of what they're doing. I mean, I remember micro moments. Do you remember the AdWords trainings on micro moments? I think that this is kind of building on top of that concept of like, if you're searching for something, what are you looking for, trying to get that information to you as quickly as possible and as accurately as possible? Well, and they're also kind of working. I ended up, you know, this often sends you down a rabbit hole, reading an article that was discussing that they're really looking for, they're going to have citations. So in this kind of along those lines, this is what Google's Pandu Norak, he's the VP of Search, said, he said, our vision for mom is not to move towards Google simply providing single, unattributed responses. Right. So it kind of felt like we were moving in the direction of, hey, you got your question. We're giving you the answer, which, you know, in today's modern era of fake news has the potential for problems. Right. So now they're saying,

hey, we're going to do more than provide single unattributed responses. We're going to provide attribution by being able to dig down more granular or up more macro. You're going to be able to kind of identify the source and follow up with the information you're seeing. So basically, they're going to give you context to the answer. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that'll certainly help. I hope it, I feel like as, as the, the, the algorithm, when hopefully they're going to work on fixing the challenge with the algorithm that only shows you what you like politically or informationally. So you, that's why I believe we're ending up with this society that's so cataclysmically divided is like, if you go to the internet every day and everything you read is about how dangerous vaccines are, you're looking over at the other side going, that's crazy that they even believe they're safe. How could you possibly take a vaccine and then you got the other side who's going to the internet and doing their searches and what's coming up in front of them is how safe it is and how all of these other people are misinformed. And you're looking over at them like they're misinformed and the algorithm is part of the problem. Well, I'm not, I'm not going to speak on that, Chris, but I will say, regardless of what the news shows you, crypto is the future. You will get no argument from me there. I mean, we could have a debate and express concerns, but you would get no argument. So that's what we wanted to bring something nice and short, nice and easy. We are going to say, Hey, we're delivering value. If you're getting value, we really could use some reviews. You can leave those reviews at EWR digital.com forward slash review. And that'll take you right to our GMB page. And we would really appreciate it. It's been a while since we've gotten a review and like, listen, like we're, we're, we're really interested in getting a review. If you just need

to type a message, send it to us. Like we're, we're, we're, we're waiting, eagerly waiting. We have gotten reviews, just not on that platform. On the next podcast, I will play a video review, which we're getting a ton of right now. So it's all about what you asked for and you get it. So we would like one on GMB though. So please leave one on GMB. We haven't had a GMB one GMB. It's really important. Velocity of reviews is certainly something that Google looks at for Google local. So if you're listening, please leave us a review. Thank you. And subscribe, follow, share. And until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.