Many years ago Google made a smart move in acquiring YouTube and it’s interesting how the platforms are very different yet their algorithms have always been aligned/fused in many ways, and the most recent updates YouTube is testing are a perfect example.

Flashing back in time to only a couple of years ago, Google started to explore and implement new ways to rank websites and decide what exactly makes them special. Conventionally, that came down to backlinks and optimizing meta information along with the other usual suspects, though if everyone is doing that and trying to game the system who really lands on top? And how do you take billions of websites then decide who should be #1?

One of the first steps Google took to counter this is the adoption of multi-modal AI algorithms that look at many dimensions (language, images/videos, etc.) to try and make sense of everything which is what sparked the “People Also Ask” section in Google search results initially. Basically, finding new ways to answer the most common questions while also continuing to learn at the same time. And that = gold.

And as their team mentioned recently related to the new search algorithm update on 8/15/24: “As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches. This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates. This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.”

Taking things one step further, this is something our team has been watching and gathering data/insights on for over a year and it’s interesting to see how results in Google’s search engine have now been fused with YouTube (more than in the past) and searches users are running on both platforms are being fused in a multi-modal way.

In a nutshell, and something we will cover more in the future, it’s cool to see Google’s approach where now YouTube is curating/suggesting new content based on searches which breaks out of their normal algorithm that’s limited in ways. Essentially, giving you new ways to explore what you’re interested in during the moment.

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