One of the biggest issues online shoppers face is finding the products they’re interested in. This can especially be apparent when comparing retail platform search capabilities with the Google Search features customers have become accustomed to.

Google Cloud is now bringing the power of its search to retail clients, with Retail Search, which the company unveiled in a blog.

This fully managed service is easily customizable, enabling organizations to craft shopper-focused search experiences. Our site search solution builds upon decades of Google’s experience and innovation in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Retailers can make product discovery even easier for shoppers, while optimizing for their business goals with advanced capabilities

Retail Search gives clients the ability to offer advanced query understanding, meaning customers will have better success finding what they’re looking for even with the broadest of search terms. The service also includes semantic search, which matches product attributes with relevant products.

Customers are already seeing the benefit of Retail Search.

“With limited customer signals and no historical data, descriptive long-tail searches are some of the most challenging queries to understand,” said Neelima Sharma, senior vice president, technology, e-commerce, marketing and merchandising at Lowe’s. “We have been partnering with Google Cloud to give our customers relevant results for long-tail searches and have seen an increase in click-through and search conversion and a drop in our ‘No Results Found’ rate since we launched.”

Google Cloud customers interested in learning more can visit Discovery Solutions for Retail or contact their Google Cloud field sales representative.

Favicons are those little icons that show up in browser tabs when visiting certain websites. They’re a way for websites to add a little more branding, but many users find them annoying and distracting. What’s more, browser favicons have been exposed as a privacy risk, allowing bad actors to track users’ activity.

Evidently, Google still believes favicons may have a place in advertising, and is testing their inclusion, according to a tweet by Google’s AdsLiason account.

This is part of a series of small experiments to help users more easily identify the brand or advertiser associated with the Search ads they may see for a given query.

AdsLiason (@adsliason), January 24, 2022

There’s no indication when Google will make a final decision.

First reported by journalist Mishaal Rahman, Android users are seeing ads in-app search results in the play store.

As Rahman goes on to point out, Google has been testing this for a few months, but the company is clearly expanding the “feature,” including more information in the ads as well.

Google may be known for many different things — search, cloud, Android, and more — but at its heart, the company is an advertising company. It’s probably only a matter of time until ads show up in more parts of Android.

Google was famously slow to jump on the AI bandwagon, being upstaged by Microsoft and its OpenAI-based Bing AI. Google was particularly concerned that inaccurate results could hurt its reputation in the search market. Despite a rough start, Google is working to catch up to Microsoft, unveiling its own Bard AI.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the company plans to add its AI to its search, despite previous concerns.

“The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before,” said Pichai.

“Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely,” Pichai added.

Microsoft’s Bing AI has helped the Redmond company’s search engine make some noticeable headway, taking market share away from Google. While Google still has a dominating lead, the company is eager to prevent any further losses and clearly wants to cash in on user excitement surrounding AI.

“It has been incredible to see user excitement around adoption of these technologies, and some of that is a pleasant surprise as well,” Pichai said.

Why is brand search difficult to control in PPC?

With brand search, you are expected to get most of the traffic. However, what we are seeing increasingly is more and more competitors entering the market in our brand space. Back in the day, it was there but you could just get them kicked off by Google or Bing. Nowadays, it’s a lot more difficult with all of the policy changes. What this actually means is that they are not only cannibalizing our traffic but they’re also pushing up our CPCs and our CPAs.

As a brand, you are always looking for ways to get people to your website and get them to convert more. It used to be just interest-based keywords on generics related to your own brand. Now you can cannibalize other peoples brands and get those incremental gains. The problem then is competitors coming into our brand space and pushing our ads down or increasing the CPCs on our ads. It’s not just direct competitors either, you have resellers, aggregators, etc. In the automotive space you have dealers and many automotive brands are having issues with trying to control how their dealers are bidding because dealers don’t have as much experience.

What we are seeing now is traffic is being lost from our brands’ brand-related search terms onto our main website and it’s going away.

This is even more important on mobile

As you know with mobile there’s a lot less space on the SERP, and usually with the size of the ads above the fold takes up most of the space and not many people are going to scroll down all the way to the bottom. Also, with mobile, it’s when people are actually looking for stuff at the moment and they’ve got less attention span, so it’s even more important that we actually pick up this traffic. Chances are that whatever they click on they are going to then stick with that. This is especially the case for retailers and automotive businesses who have local offerings and people looking for local specific information.

On mobile, the lower your ad position is the higher (negative) impact it has on your clickthrough rate.

On tablet and on desktop the actual CTR decrease as your ad position goes down isn’t as significant as it is on mobile. This goes to show that on mobile we need to make sure that our ad positions are up there at the top.

How valuable is your brand space?

Once you have the data and you know about your brand space it’s about analyzing the data and finding out how valuable is your brand space to you? Years ago you could just log into Google Analytics and look at the value per click of your organic brand and the value per click of your paid search brand. As long as the value was more than your cost per click it made it viable to bid on your brand. It was a pretty simple analysis.

Then seven years ago Google took away the ability to see organic keyword data and analytics have become harder. What we are seeing now is that’s it’s a lot more difficult to access this data and so people are having to think of different tests that they can come up with.

I like to use standard deviation to get the validity of the data in the beginning in order to measure the success of the ad test. The reason for this is that gives a much better data set to work with so once you actually have the data in you can use a range to look at the changes we see if we then turn the brand off. If it fits within this range then fine, we don’t need to work on brand PPC. If it’s outside of the range then we know that PPC needs to be turned on because it’s having a significant impact on our business.

Google has long been at odds with news publishers. Many have tried to get the company to pay for news, but the company has made it a practice to link to and use news content without paying. Google has always claimed that news publishers benefit far more than it does from the arrangement.

In spite of that, the company has begun caving to pressure. France has ordered Google to pay for news and the company recently set aside $1 billion to help fund partnerships with publishers.

Google seems unwilling to give into Australia’s demands, however, according to ABC News. According to the report, Google has said it will pull its search engine if Australia moves ahead with its plans to force the company to pay.

“If this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia,” Mel Silva, the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, told a Senate inquiry. “And that would be a bad outcome not only for us, but also for the Australian people, media diversity, and the small businesses who use our products every day.”

That stance did not go over well with the government, with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying “we don’t respond to threats.”

It remains to be seen how things will eventually shake out, but it’s not looking good for Google Australia either way.

Favicons are those little icons that show up in browser tabs when visiting certain websites. They’re a way for websites to add a little more branding, but many users find them annoying and distracting. What’s more, browser favicons have been exposed as a privacy risk, allowing bad actors to track users’ activity.

Evidently, Google still believes favicons may have a place in advertising, and is testing their inclusion, according to a tweet by Google’s AdsLiason account.

This is part of a series of small experiments to help users more easily identify the brand or advertiser associated with the Search ads they may see for a given query.

AdsLiason (@adsliason), January 24, 2022

There’s no indication when Google will make a final decision.

Google has long been at odds with news publishers. Many have tried to get the company to pay for news, but the company has made it a practice to link to and use news content without paying. Google has always claimed that news publishers benefit far more than it does from the arrangement.

In spite of that, the company has begun caving to pressure. France has ordered Google to pay for news and the company recently set aside $1 billion to help fund partnerships with publishers.

Google seems unwilling to give into Australia’s demands, however, according to ABC News. According to the report, Google has said it will pull its search engine if Australia moves ahead with its plans to force the company to pay.

“If this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia,” Mel Silva, the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, told a Senate inquiry. “And that would be a bad outcome not only for us, but also for the Australian people, media diversity, and the small businesses who use our products every day.”

That stance did not go over well with the government, with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying “we don’t respond to threats.”

It remains to be seen how things will eventually shake out, but it’s not looking good for Google Australia either way.

Google’s VRPs rewards security researchers who find and report bugs so the company can address them. According to the company, 2019’s payout doubled what had been paid in any previous single year.

Programs such as this have become a critical tool for companies in the fight against hackers and cybercriminals. By relying on security researchers and “white hat” hackers, companies hope to find security vulnerabilities and bugs before cyber criminals, or “black hats.”

According to Google, “since 2010, we have expanded our VRPs to cover additional Google product areas, including Chrome, Android, and most recently Abuse. We’ve also expanded to cover popular third party apps on Google Play, helping identify and disclose vulnerabilities to impacted app developers. Since then we have paid out more than $21 million in rewards.”

Although $6.5 million is a sizable amount, it pales in comparison to the cost of an exploited security vulnerability or data breach. In fact, according to a study sponsored by IBM Security, the average cost of a single data breach is $3.92 million. In view of the number of bug fixes that $6.5 million facilitated, it seems like quite the bargain.

Google was in the news recently for blurring the line between organic search results and ads, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. The move was important because Google only makes money when users click on ads, as opposed to organic results. Therefore, it’s in the company’s interest for users to click on as many ads, or sponsored links, as possible.

The move did not sit well with anyone, however, with consumers, journalists and politicians alike slamming the search giant. As TechCrunch points out, Senator Mark Warner told the Washington Post:

“We’ve seen multiple instances over the last few years where Google has made paid advertisements ever more indistinguishable from organic search results. This is yet another example of a platform exploiting its bottleneck power for commercial gain, to the detriment of both consumers and also small businesses.”

The company has now acknowledged, via Twitter, that it needs to go back to the drawing boards to deliver an update that addresses user concern.

“Here’s our full statement on why we’re going to experiment further. Our early tests of the design for desktop were positive. But we appreciate the feedback, the trust people place in Google, and we’re dedicating to improving the experience.”

—Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 24, 2020

As the report points out, past studies have had little actual data to go on and have, instead, relied on case studies and subject assessments to predict which jobs and industries were most vulnerable.

“What’s more, most research has concentrated on an undifferentiated array of ‘automation’ technologies including robotics, software, and AI all at once,” the report says. “The result has been a lot of discussion—but not a lot of clarity—about AI, with prognostications that range from the utopian to the apocalyptic.”

In contrast, a new method devised by Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Michael Webb compares job descriptions with AI-related patents, giving a higher degree of accuracy.

The new data shows that low-wage jobs will continue to be heavily impacted by automation and robotics. When it comes to true AI, however, “the present analysis suggests that better-educated, better-paid workers (along with manufacturing and production workers) will be the most affected by the new AI technologies, with some exceptions.”

Professions that have a high amount of predictive work, or pattern-oriented tasks are the kind of jobs AI is particularly well-suited to take over.

“At the high end of AI involvement, for example, are numerous well-paid occupations that had relatively low exposure in our earlier, all-encompassing automation analysis. They range from market research analysts and sales managers to programmers, management analysts, and engineers. Often analytic or supervisory, these roles appear heavily involved in pattern-oriented or predictive work, and may therefore be especially susceptible to the data- driven inroads of AI, even though they seemed relatively immune in earlier analyses.”

In addition, individuals “with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree.” The data also shows that high-tech metro areas will be more susceptible than most rural areas.

The original, in-depth report is 46 pages long and is a fascinating read, providing some all-new insights into the far-reaching impacts AI will have on all economic sectors.

The new Search Ads will work the same way as conventional search engines. The user will type what they are looking for in the search bar and the platform will show the results. And similar to Google, the promoted results will be at the top of the list.

Facebook’s product manager, Zoheb Hajiyani revealed that this new feature is just a trial run, and only a select number of eCommerce, retail, and automotive companies in Canada and the US have access to it. He also explained that they are only conducting “a small test to place ads in Facebook search results.” The company will then assess the value of these ads before deciding whether it will be beneficial to expand it.

The new Search ads will be composed of a headline, an image, copy, and a link to external websites. While the format is more complicated than Google’s text ads, Hajiyani admitted that they’re still improving the feature’s design.

Facebook is relaunching Search Ads to tackle slowing revenue growth https://t.co/a5ygVkjtqK pic.twitter.com/ucibehcQWr

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) December 11, 2018

Facebook also hasn’t commented on whether the search triggers are based on phrases or branded or non-branded keywords. But the company will reportedly tag the ads with a “Sponsored” label. It will also provide users with the same controls and transparency settings that will determine what ads they will see.

Users won’t be able to opt out of these ads though. While they can “hide” ads they don’t want to see, much like how it’s done with News Feed advertisements, it won’t stop different ads from appearing on their wall later.

This is not Facebook’s first foray into monetizing the search feature. It previously launched a “sponsored results” feature in 2012 but shut down the project the following year when it was discovered that many advertisers were taking advantage of loopholes in the system.

If account holders take a shine to the new Search Ads, it could lead to a new and significant revenue stream for the company. It will also pit Facebook directly against Google’s paid-search ads.

At the moment, Facebook needs something to energize its growth. Most of the company’s profit comes from ads. Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild saw its profits peak at 59 percent in the third quarter of 2016 and 49 percent in 2017. However, this year’s revenue only grew by 33 percent.

[Featured image via Pixabay]

Why is brand search difficult to control in PPC?

With brand search, you are expected to get most of the traffic. However, what we are seeing increasingly is more and more competitors entering the market in our brand space. Back in the day, it was there but you could just get them kicked off by Google or Bing. Nowadays, it’s a lot more difficult with all of the policy changes. What this actually means is that they are not only cannibalizing our traffic but they’re also pushing up our CPCs and our CPAs.

As a brand, you are always looking for ways to get people to your website and get them to convert more. It used to be just interest-based keywords on generics related to your own brand. Now you can cannibalize other peoples brands and get those incremental gains. The problem then is competitors coming into our brand space and pushing our ads down or increasing the CPCs on our ads. It’s not just direct competitors either, you have resellers, aggregators, etc. In the automotive space you have dealers and many automotive brands are having issues with trying to control how their dealers are bidding because dealers don’t have as much experience.

What we are seeing now is traffic is being lost from our brands’ brand-related search terms onto our main website and it’s going away.

This is even more important on mobile

As you know with mobile there’s a lot less space on the SERP, and usually with the size of the ads above the fold takes up most of the space and not many people are going to scroll down all the way to the bottom. Also, with mobile, it’s when people are actually looking for stuff at the moment and they’ve got less attention span, so it’s even more important that we actually pick up this traffic. Chances are that whatever they click on they are going to then stick with that. This is especially the case for retailers and automotive businesses who have local offerings and people looking for local specific information.

On mobile, the lower your ad position is the higher (negative) impact it has on your clickthrough rate.

On tablet and on desktop the actual CTR decrease as your ad position goes down isn’t as significant as it is on mobile. This goes to show that on mobile we need to make sure that our ad positions are up there at the top.

How valuable is your brand space?

Once you have the data and you know about your brand space it’s about analyzing the data and finding out how valuable is your brand space to you? Years ago you could just log into Google Analytics and look at the value per click of your organic brand and the value per click of your paid search brand. As long as the value was more than your cost per click it made it viable to bid on your brand. It was a pretty simple analysis.

Then seven years ago Google took away the ability to see organic keyword data and analytics have become harder. What we are seeing now is that’s it’s a lot more difficult to access this data and so people are having to think of different tests that they can come up with.

I like to use standard deviation to get the validity of the data in the beginning in order to measure the success of the ad test. The reason for this is that gives a much better data set to work with so once you actually have the data in you can use a range to look at the changes we see if we then turn the brand off. If it fits within this range then fine, we don’t need to work on brand PPC. If it’s outside of the range then we know that PPC needs to be turned on because it’s having a significant impact on our business.

With Google One, consumers can get 100GB and 200 GB of storage for monthly fees of $1.99 and $2.99, respectively. The 2TB plan was priced at $19.99 previously but will now cost $9.99 a month after the 1TB plan gets discontinued. And for heavy users, the rates for 10TB, 20TB, and 30TB will remain unchanged.

But, why the need for increased storage? Google pointed that users nowadays have more mobile devices, shoot more 4K videos, and take high-resolution photographs, requiring more storage and easier sharing of files online.

With more space, smarter options, access to experts and more, Google One is a simple plan for expanded storage with extra benefits to help you get more out of Google → https://t.co/65IdUJmn5Z pic.twitter.com/hJTXvvAWkZ

— Google (@Google) May 14, 2018

Following public clamor, paid consumers can now share their storage limit with up to five family members. Each will have their own private storage space, aside from the extra benefits that come with Google One. Users, even with the basic storage account, will have ‘one-tap’ access to round-the-clock support with live experts onboard, and not just AI-powered chatbots to answer queries.     

Google promises to add more benefits to its available plans, but for now, users can look forward to credits on Google Play, discounts on select hotels discovered in Google Search, or premium rates on other services. After all, the tech giant noticed that people with paid storage plans are often heavy users of Google products.

Despite the exciting announcement, rollout will happen gradually over the next few months so users should look out for email confirmation regarding the update. Existing storage plans in the US will be upgraded to Google One first before they are made available worldwide. The tech giant revealed that it will launch an Android app to help users in managing their accounts, and not their files.

On the other hand, Google assured that G Suite business customers will not be affected by the upgrade. The free 15GB storage quota under Google Drive will also remain available to all accounts.  

Google’s latest storage plans will most likely be extended to include other services and packaged under a single subscription offering. It will be poised to compete with OneDrive, a subscription worth $99.99 annually or $9.99 monthly through the Microsoft Store. Similar to Google One, it has 1TB storage quota that can be shared with five users. There are, however, no options to modify storage space or plans for over 1TB. The subscription comes with access to Office suite apps, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as a monthly allocation of 60 minutes of Skype calls per user.

According to Acquisio, paid search accounts that have been optimised for machine learning have 71% higher conversion rates and have lower cost-per-click (CPC). But these were not the only benefits that accounts using machine learning enjoyed. The web marketing company also revealed these accounts were also able to reach their target spending levels and had lower churn rates.

The data implies that small marketing teams and CMOs now stand on an even playing field with more established companies now that ML is more affordable, effective and accessible to everyone.

This doesn’t mean that marketers should ignore organic search and original, value-laden content. Paid search might be the easiest way to rank high in search engines, particularly since AI will be doing the bulk of the work, developing campaigns that have greater odds of being seen by the right searchers at the proper time. However, organic search is more authentic and will last longer than paid searches.

The goal now is to understand how ML impacts the search system and how to take advantage of the technology’s evolution that made paid and organic searches more effective.

Paid vs Organic Search: Which Wins in the End?

There’s been an ongoing debate as to which is better – paid or organic searches. Interestingly, both have come out on top, but at different times and conditions. The results have depended on the type of research done and other outside factors. For instance, a study conducted in 2011 showed that organic search was more effective. However, paid search has outpaced its counterpart from 2013 onwards. But this appears to be due to the changes Google has made to its algorithm.

So which is better? Andy Taylor, the Associate Director of Research at Merkle, believes that flexibility is the best option. Instead of just sticking to one approach, companies should determine what search strategy is ideal for their business at the moment and the technology that’s currently available. After all, the ideal marketing strategy for your company now will probably change in a few months as customers change their expectations and technologies expand.

Machine Learning is Changing More Than Search

The rise of machine learning has also resulted in a shift to data-driven models instead of the conventional attribution models. This multi-touch attribution model (MTA) relies on an analytics scale that’s more descriptive and takes into account various touchpoint outputs, like ad interactions, ad creative, or exposure order. It also allows marketers to have a better understanding of how factors, like a distinct set of keywords and ad words, can affect a conversion.

But it’s not just search capacities that machine learning has an impact on. The technology is also being used to refine and make algorithm changes. It has been theorized that Google’s RankBrain utilizes machine learning to assess if the company has to revise its own rankings based on what the consumer searches for and whether the user was satisfied with the result.

Machine Learning Will Push for More Sophisticated Content

Because machine learning technology is developing more advanced SEM capacities and sophisticated algorithms, search engines are pushing marketers and content producers to deliver more refined content. This would eventually lead to search engines becoming more discerning to the quality of online content a company is putting out. This means producing high-quality content that particularly targets what the consumer is looking for becomes more vital than ever before.

Machine learning and AI are impacting every aspect of marketing. Companies should start understanding them and how to utilize ML-optimized tools effectively in their marketing campaigns.  

“To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly,” posted Google Product Manager Doantam Phan . “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller.”

People have become very upset over intrusive popups on mobile devices because it significantly degrades the user experience. “I can’t stand all this stuff popping up on my phone,” commented Bonnie Akridge. “I wish they would get rid of it all. Much of what I read is already mobile friendly but I get the question box do I want to switch to mobile friendly. All this crap is so flipping annoying. I didn’t sign up for this and I hate it being force on me.”

An internet marketer had a somewhat different reaction. “I’ve always hated those popups that come up and block the page (especially on mobile),” stated S. Kyle Davis. “Now it seems that Google has made the use of “interstitials” a ranking point. Good to hear! Of course, any time Google does something like this, the opposite reaction is that it is making things harder for advertisers (thus making it harder for content producers to make money and continue producing content). However, I always hope that it pushes us to find better, less obtrusive and more effective ways to communicate paid messages to audiences.”

Although this initially applies to only mobile search rankings, its a reasonable prediction that Google will extend this to desktop rankings as well in the future, effectively killing interstitial and popup advertising on the internet.

“Although the majority of pages now have text and content on the page that is readable without zooming, we’ve recently seen many examples where these pages show intrusive interstitials to users,” says Phan. “While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result.”

Google specifically does not want sites to show a popup that covers the main content either immediately or delayed, they don’t want any ads that have to be closed by the user and they consider large top ads to be effectively the same as an interstitial. So they are going to penalize sites where ads dominate above the fold space.

They did offer exceptions where they won’t rank lower sites with interstitials that are a response to a legal obligation such as age verification, are part of a login process or small top banners.

“Remember, this new signal is just one of hundreds of signals that are used in ranking,” said Phan. “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”

But first lets talk business.

“I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases, said Zuckerberg. “First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there’s a large volume of people interacting with businesses, give businesses tools to reach more people and pay. And that’s ultimately the business opportunity.”

During the earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain into Facebook’s plans, strategies and dreams for the future. He first provided the latest metrics illustrating Facebook’s continued success, 1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.1 billion people use it every day. He said that Facebook revenue grew by 59% year-over year to $6.4 billion, and advertising revenue was up 63% to $6.2 billion.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook said that Q2 ad revenue grew 63% and mobile ad revenue hit $5.2 billion, up 81% year-over-year, and was approximately 84% of total ad revenue. Facebook is now truly a mobile app rather than a desktop experience for the vast majority of its users.

Zuckerberg said that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. Time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. And that doesn’t even include WhatsApp yet.

Facebook is still growing rapidly and that’s because it has continued to evolve. It’s evolution has happened because of increased bandwidth, technological advancements, acquisitions of new platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and most importantly continuing to be on the cutting edge of what people want in a social network. All of this while simultaneously building a successful business model that pays for this evolution.

What’s really interesting however, is how Zuckerberg sees Facebook transforming in the future. “Our results show our progress as we work to make the world more open and connected across our three-, five- and ten-year horizons,” he said. “Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways.”

Facebook is seeking to be the world’s business platform, not just the peoples. More on this below in the Search section on a Facebook future where it is competing with LinkedIn.

“We’re excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform. This shows that both our free and paid products are providing value to marketers of all sizes around the world. We continue to focus on our three priorities — capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of marketers using our ad products, and making our ads more relevant and effective.”

Trust me, this is just the beginning of Facebook’s morphing into both a personal and business platform in the future.

The Future of Facebook is Video

Facebook used to be mostly text and over the years they changed to be photo centric, with many people using Facebook as their family photo album. People still do that but Zuckerberg envisions a huge change coming. “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services.”

“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times. Live is also changing the way we see politics, as news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic conventions. And we have seen in Minnesota and Dallas how Live can shine a light on important moments as they happen.”

At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”

“When you think about what’s happening on video on our platform we’re really excited by the production and consumption of video and we’re seeing the full range from people posting the things in their personal lives; the power of what a mobile phone can produce and distribute now is pretty incredible when you compare it to just a few years ago to some of the most sophisticated content producers in the world producing for us,” added Sandberg.

Facebook Focuses on Search

Facebook is moving into the search space aggressively, definitely to help it compete with Twitter and perhaps even Google in the future. Facebook launched true keyword search in late 2014 that allows users to search not just profile names or just your friends posts, but also everyone’s public posts. And, if you didn’t know, all postings default at public, which means that anyone can search for your posts.

The first goal for Facebook with search is to become more like Twitter, where people post their thoughts, feelings and most importantly news reports, especially the on-the-scene kind. When the next plane lands in the Hudson, Facebook wants the survivor standing on the wing to use their platform to post about this breaking news, not Twitter. More precisely, Facebook wants you to use Facebook Live to stream your personalized live news coverage.

“We’re making good progress on core services within the Facebook app, like Search,” Zuckerberg stated. “A growing way people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across the more than 2.5 trillion posts in our network. Now, people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day, between looking up people, businesses and other things that they care about. Continuous, steady improvement to services like search are an important part of helping people connect and realizing our mission.”

He also said this in minimizing their true plans, in my opinion.

So I’d say we’re around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to and look at and search. One of the big growing use cases that we’re investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we’re very excited about which helps people find more content.

But certainly there’s a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial intense and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we’re still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.

But what’s their next goal? Facebook has certainly focused on the business use of their platform as they continue to look for monetization opportunities. My guess is that Facebook will seek to compete with LinkedIn as the business platform of record.

Over the last few years LinkedIn has certainly moved from a glorified directory of business professionals to a platform for business related news, conversation and connection. Facebook has the platform but would need to figure out how to easily separate family life from business life, which could be done rather easily. With Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook will be highly motivated to compete.

Next up for Facebook Search would be to compete with Google. Why… you ask? Because Google has a market cap of $520 billion, with the majority of that credited to its search business, while Facebook has a market cap of $362 billion. More importantly, it’s about revenue and profit. In 2015, Google had $75 billion in revenue and $16 billion in net income while Facebook had $17 billion in revenue and $3.6 billion in net income.

Google tried to compete with Facebook with Google+ and it failed miserably, but that’s because it’s harder to get people to change their social habits than it is their search habits. You don’t need your friends to use Facebook Search in order for you to find it useful, but you definitely need your friends to move to a new social platform to make it work for you. That was Google’s dilemma, but it won’t be Facebook’s.

“Since it refocused on keywords, Facebook is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts,” stated TechCrunch writer Josh Constine. “That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months.”

That’s lets than half a reported 3.5 billion searches per day on Google. The difference is that Google’s searches are monitizable, while Facebook searches, not so much. However, this must scare the heck out of Google because it shows how ingrained people are to use Facebook for search. Therefore, over time I predict that Facebook will add web indexing to it’s search engine. They already have 3.5 billion searches, why not open up search to everything and in the process open up a huge monetization opportunity.

One other prediction, Facebook will disconnect its search app from just Facebook.com, just like they did Messenger. Then, voilà, Facebook is competing with Google.

Making Instagram Stronger

Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion while it was just getting off the ground. It is now center to its plans on connecting with everyone in the world on a constant always on basis. That’s why Instagram is so important to Facebook, it has a foothold with younger people and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook’s, so it expands the corporate Facebook’s universe of connectivity and engagement.

“Over the next five years we are working hard to build ecosystems around some of our newer products,” said Zuckerberg. “Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. Now we’re working to make the experience more engaging.”

He said that when Instagram, despite user pushback, began to rank its feed in order to improve the experience, that they are already seeing a “positive impact” with people spending more time and share more content within the platform.

As always, business is important to Zuckerberg as well. “We’ve also introduced our advertising tools on Instagram and we’re seeing marketers engage with people in creative and innovative ways.”

Messaging with Messenger & WhatsApp

“In the two years since we separated Messenger from the main Facebook app — which was a controversial decision at the time — we’ve improved performance and given people new ways to express themselves,” commented Zuckerberg. “Now, for the first time, more than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month.”

Facebook sees a huge opportunity with messaging because it moves them closer to their goal of connecting everyone on a constant always on basis. That’s why they paid $22 billion for WhatsApp, which is a service that barely had a business model.

“I’m also happy with the updates we’re making to WhatsApp — which also has a community of more than 1 billion people,” said Zuckerberg. “This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp’s voice calling features.”

Facebook has big plans for messaging because not only does it help them bring even more people into Facebook’s universe, but it moves them into the business space, where Facebook desperately wants to be, because that’s where the money is.

“The scale we’ve achieved with our messaging services makes it clear that they are more than just a way to chat with friends,” Zuckerberg noted. “That’s why we’re also making it easier for people to connect with groups and businesses as well. We are going to keep focusing on this over the next several years.”

Facebook owned messaging has now taken over standard text messaging according to Zuckerberg.

“Between Messenger and WhatsApp I think we’re around 60 billion messages a day which is something like three times more than the peak of global SMS traffic.”

It’s incredible to think that Facebook now owns the messaging space. Who would have thought that 3 years ago?

New Technologies

“I’m also excited about the early progress we’re making on our 10-year initiatives,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during their recent earnings announcement. “We are investing in new technologies to give more people a voice — including the 4 billion people around the world who aren’t yet online — and helping more people take advantage of the opportunities that come with the internet.”

Facebook is seeking to connect everyone in the world, regardless of any obstacle. It’s a long term plan, but Facebook is on it.

“One of the biggest opportunities to grow our community is in developing countries where connectivity is less advanced than what we take for granted here at home,” Zuckerberg said. “So over the past couple of years, we’ve began making steady improvements to our apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection people are using. We also built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, that is tuned to work on 2G networks and is now used by more than 100 million people.”

Virtual reality is another huge area of investment for Facebook, especially with their $2 billion purchase of Oculus. They see VR as an extension of connecting and sharing. Know one really knows the future of VR, but it will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future and since all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, they need to be in this space.

“We believe that virtual reality can help people share richer experiences and help everyone understand what’s going on around the world,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s really early for us in VR but we’re hitting some important milestones. As of the second quarter more than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR 4partnership with Samsung.”

Zuckerberg also commented on the potential revenue importance of their investment in VR:

“More than 300 apps are already available at the Oculus store for Gear VR, we’ve filled all of our pre-orders for Oculus Rift and we are seeing increasing demand from retail as stores plan for the holidays. While it’s still early for augmented reality, we’re doing AR research and are seeing lightweight versions of AR technology today in mobile apps like MSQRD.”

Facebook is Just Getting Started

“So that’s a recap of the progress we’re making in our 10 year plan,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a saying at Facebook that our journey is only 1% done — and while I’m happy with our progress, we have a lot more work to do to grow our community and connect the whole world. That means making big investments and taking risks — focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be.”

“We’re happy to expand the depth and quality of lyrics available on Google’s services,” says LyricFind CEO Darryl Ballantyne. “We’re working together to make lyrics available to a larger audience in a faster and more efficient way.”

We're happy to announce our partnership with Google! Through this new deal, LyricFind will add lyrics from 4,000… https://t.co/upKXDG6cZg

— LyricFind (@LyricFind) June 27, 2016

LyricFind, founded by Darryl Ballantyne and Mohamed Moutadayne bills itself as “the world’s leader in legal lyric solutions.” The company was founded in 2004.

Billboard spoke to Ballantyne and got this quote indicating that the partnership will generate millions more in royalties to its publishing partners:

“It should be a significant revenue stream,” Ballantyne said. “I can’t get into the rates, but we expect it to be millions of dollars generated for publishers and songwriters as a result of this. It’s all based on usage. Royalties are paid based on the number of times a lyric is viewed. The more it’s viewed, the more publishers get paid.”

Included in the over 4,000 music publishers that LyricFind currently licenses are all the majors – Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing (including EMI Music Publishing), and Kobalt. According to LyricFind, they are also the exclusive third-party lyrics licensor for Universal Music Publishing Group, the world’s largest music publisher.

In January, Bloomberg Business reported that Google paid Apple $1 billion to keep its search bar on the iPhone. Now, the company appears to be going even further to ensure people keep using Google to search from Apple’s devices.

The keyboard news comes from The Verge, which says it has been in development for months, has been in use internally, and incorporates a variety of search options:

The Google keyboard incorporates a number of features meant to distinguish it from the stock iOS keyboard. Like its Android counterpart, the Google keyboard for iOS employs gesture-based typing, so you can slide your finger from one letter to the next and let Google guess your intended word. Tap the Google logo and you can access traditional web search. It also appears to have distinct buttons for pictures and GIF searches, both presumably powered by Google image search. The keyboard is visually distinct from the standard Android keyboard, which incorporates voice search but no text or image-based searching.

In recent years, Apple has distanced itself from Google where possible – most notably the use of Google Maps with the introduction of the initially flawed Apple Maps, which has been said to be greatly improved these days.

If Google can convince iOS users they need its keyboard it could help, though I can’t honestly imagine it would make a huge difference.

As The Verge notes, it’s unclear if Google actually plans to release this or not.

Image via Google

“Marketers rely on paid search campaigns to reach customers across multiple digital platforms,” a spokesperson for Marchex said in an email. “But when it comes to measuring the results of these campaigns, there’s a significant gap between online ad impressions and offline sales – especially in today’s mobile world when inbound calls are easier than ever.”

The integration seeks to change that.

They cite research from Google showing that 57% of smartphone users call a business after searching for info on their phone because they want to talk to a real person.

Marchex Search Analtyics delivers call intelligence data such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) inputs for each keyword directly into DoubleClick Search so markters can optimize their search marketing efforts accordingly.

“Our integration with DoubleClick search is designed for the largest search marketers with hundreds of thousands of keywords,” said Nilesh Dhawale, Senior Product Manager at Marchex. “We are thrilled to partner with DoubleClick Search to provide any client that uses click-to-call the ability to properly automate paid search bidding.”

The Marchex Analytics Platform is already being leveraged with DoubleClick Search for clients in a variety of industries. including Time Warner Cable, Liberty University, and Location3.

Image via DoubleClick