Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 52 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Contents
Tip: How To Get Verified on LinkedIn (It’s Easy)
Analysis: The Saddest Song Ever Samsung by Google
Tip: How To Get Verified on LinkedIn (It’s Easy)
You’ll remember from Friday that LinkedIn is now offering profile verification. There are three ways to get verified, and I’m going to walk you through the method that anybody (in the U.S.) can use: Uploading a government ID.
I used my state driver’s license to complete the process in about three minutes.
Open the LinkedIn app on your phone
Go to your profile
Click the three horizontal dots to the right of the white “add section” button
Click the bottom option, About this profile
Click the button at the bottom to verify your identity with an official document
Click Verify with CLEAR (the same organization that verifies you for TSA pre-check if I’m not mistaken)
Follow the instructions for CLEAR
For me this meant taking a selfie, then uploading the front and back of my driver’s license. When the screen pops up asking you if they can send the information to LinkedIn, you have to click yes.
If everything goes smoothly, you should be verified in a matter of seconds.
One thing to note: My name on LinkedIn is Brad Gerick, but on my ID I’m Bradley Gerick. This wasn’t an issue, so don’t feel like your LinkedIn profile has to EXACTLY match your government ID for smaller differences. I doubt you’ll get away with using nicknames, though.
Benefits of LinkedIn Verification
Distinguish yourself from bots
Show recruiters, colleagues and peers that it’s really you, giving them more confidence to contact you
Should you ever be hacked or impersonated, it will be much easier to show LinkedIn (and others) who the “real” you is as you fight to get the other profile taken down
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: The Saddest Song Ever Samsung by Google
Samsung is considering making Microsoft's Bing the default search engine on its phones, replacing longtime partner Google, the New York Times reported over the weekend.
In response, Google is not only upgrading its existing search engine with artificial intelligence (AI) features, but it's also creating an entirely new search engine, according to the Times.
Google, which commands more than 88 percent of all U.S. search queries as of March 2023, has been Samsung's partner for 12 years.
Bing's implementation of ChatGPT into its search engine has put the longtime No. 2 search engine on many new users' radar. While it still pulls in less than 7 percent of the overall U.S. search share, the launch of its Edge browser + AI chatbot has increased its user count by "millions+."
More choices mean more competition. When behemoths like Google and Microsoft face off, it can only increase each side's sense of urgency, thus yielding a better product. (Whether those improvements come at a social and ethical cost is a whole other discussion. The AI-driven results, however, will become more personalized and accurate whether we like it or not.)
A more complicated inquiry: How will this affect SEO?
We're already seeing some of the answers to that question, though many of the most important ones have speculative solutions at best.
The chasm between Google's search dominance and its competitors is a self-perpetuating one.
As content creators seek more and more traffic to their platforms – whether that be to generate more money via display ads, app downloads, services, products or any other revenue sources that increase with more views – they often tailor their pages to satisfy Google's black box of a search algorithm.
While there are some standard SEO best practices that bode well for content on Google, Bing as well as most other search engines, their algorithms are proprietary.
Some people's entire careers/businesses depend on having a strong SEO strategy and/or teaching others how to execute one.
So what happens if Google not only moves the goalposts but rather, the entire stadium?
First, the good news. A core tenet of ranking high on any reputable search engine (not just pure search engines, but also search engines within platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, or even your very own website) is high-quality, useful content. Google touts this in its E-E-A-T guidelines, which I talk about often. Google's whole aim is to direct users to the most relevant web page based on their search query.
How do we know this? Because they have an incentive to do so.
The better your Google search experience, the more likely you are to come back. The more likely you are to come back, the more likely you are to see – and possibly click on – more ads. Ads from which Google takes a cut to the tune of more than $42 billion in Q4 2022.
You don't have to do the math to understand that losing out as the default search engine on millions of Samsung devices could mean losing millions of potential searches which would mean millions, if not billions of potential lost revenue should Samsung actually make the switch. (TechRadar did in fact do the math, and estimates that it would cost Google $3 billion per year.)
Samsung has a similar incentive – to give its devices’ users the best experience possible so that they buy their mobile device from the South Korean technology giant and not, say, Apple. You see, Samsung : Apple :: Google : Bing.
Google and Samsung's relationship is based purely on how beneficial it is to each of them. Why does Samsung care that Google has the biggest search share in the (world by a wide margin) if Bing gives its product's purchasers a better experience?
Would a pizza restaurant choose a tomato supplier with the biggest farm, or with the best-tasting tomatoes?
Thus, Google is in a "panic," according to the Times, to remain Samsung's most attractive partner. And they're doing that by fast-tracking their AI integration into their search engine, to the point that they're creating an entirely new one. Which brings us to the bad news.
The code name for this project is Magi (as in, "The Gift of the..."??).
Plans for the new search engine, which demonstrate Google’s ambitions to reimagine the search experience, are still in the early stages, with no clear timetable on when it will release the new search technology.
The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.
Whatever the final version looks like, we probably have a decent sneak preview in the form of Bard (not to be confused with myself), which is Google's rushed and underwhelming answer to Bing's AI chatbot.
My initial impression of Bard was that it was a bust. While it has improved, I must say, I still prefer ChatGPT and/or Bing's AI chatbot.
The most glaring issues, in my opinion: Bard is less accurate than its competition, and it seldom cites sources.
The accuracy part, while paramount, is of less concern. (As a journalist, it pains me to say that.) For one, Bard and all the other bots will improve as the people that build them learn to improve the way they process and distribute information. Not to mention protect them from manipulation by bad actors. So while accuracy is actually the most important thing we should expect of AI chatbots and search engines, it's something Bing and ChatGPT also struggle with (though to a lesser degree, based on my singular perspective).
The other issue – citing sources – is actually of more concern for those of us who make some or all of our living on search engine optimization. If your reaction is to "get over it," I'll respond to that in a moment.
First, some more context. Just like Google benefits when more people use its search engine, and Samsung benefits when more people buy its devices, content creators – to put it very broadly – benefit when more people use their sites/apps.
So if Google (or Bing) can give a user the answer they need without them having to visit the actual platform, that's bad for content creators. But this issue hasn't arisen alongside the chatbots – it already existed, and it’s called “zero-click searches.”
Zero-click searches are when a user searches for something and – you guessed it – doesn't click anything. While Google isn't to blame for all of these, search widgets that allow you to get the information you need without wasting time clicking through are great for Google and the end user, but not so great for the platforms that created the content.
Here are a couple of examples of potential zero-click searches (though of course whether someone clicks depends largely on each user and what they're trying to find out):
So, if the user gets what he or she wants, who cares whether they click anything?
The previous screenshots are from Google's "traditional" search engine. In both cases, we got the information we were looking for without clicking through.
What happens when we put these same queries to Bard?
Same great – if not better and less distracting – information. But no sources.
To be fair, you could argue the MJ data as common knowledge, and no one really "deserves" to rank high for his birthdate.
But Bard has never – and will never – make a sourdough starter. i.e. It doesn’t have experience making a sourdough starter. So if it's going to tell us what it is, I would like to have a source.
And not just so places like The Perfect Loaf (which I highly recommend for autodidactic bread bakers) get credit for its work (shoutout to Leo), but because there are some topics that are much more important than Michael Jordan and sourdough starter, and if Google is going to have a big influence what people believe and how they see the world, they owe it to us to pull back the curtain on how they provide that information.
Alas, Google claims that "Bard, like some other standalone LLM experiences, is intended to generate original content and not replicate existing content at length."
I call BS on this, since last I checked, Bard isn’t God. i.e. It can't create something out of nothing to "generate original content." It can only create based on existing content.
Google appears to be suffering from hubris on multiple fronts:
Believing it doesn't need to cite sources because Bard can "generate original content"
Believing it can rush Bard out the door – since Microsoft's investment in ChatGPT gave it a big head start on incorporating AI into its search engine – and still deliver a product up to the usual Google quality standards
Believing business will continue as usual as Bing's advantages become more apparent to partners like Samsung, if not end users themselves, who don't need to buy a new phone just to switch their default search browser
In one sense, I don't have a dog in this fight, because I'm happy to continue using Bing, Google and both of their chatbots simultaneously to find the best information possible for any given query. In that, however, I'm surely an outlier as most people who don't work in tech/content are going to choose one option and stick with it.
In another sense, however, I have a very large dog in this fight, because a significant part of the work I do is based on SEO.
While we don't know exactly how things will look once the dust settles, we do know there are drastic changes on the horizon.
Three billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's less than 2 percent of Google's annual search-related ad revenue. Google, and parent company Alphabet, will be fine.
And we, as content creators, will be fine, too. So long as we're willing to adapt, and when necessary, make difficult choices. It's exactly what the companies we're leveraging to do our jobs are already doing.
Postscript
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