Friday, December 31, 2021
It’s that time of year again: writing a blogpost about what happened during the year, and the
aspirations for the year to come. Since writing is hard, we asked the Googlers who’ve authored for
the Search Central Blog in 2021 to collaborate with us again, and to reflect on what was memorable
and what they’re excited about for 2022. Basically, this is their blog post.
What was a memorable moment in Search in 2021 that you’d like to share?
2021 was a wild ride, and that’s represented by the responses we got for our questions as well.
Some folks like John Mueller felt that
certain tweets
and websites were the most memorable things in
2021, along with the increased focus on
speed. Both John and
Jeff Jose were enthusiastic about
Core Web Vitals, particularly how well it
was received by the larger ecosystem and how folks got to work to make the web a better place for
all.
Events were scarce in 2021, so we focused on producing podcasts and
videos.
Aurora Morales joined us on the
Search Off the Record podcast for an
episode about
Sustainable Monetized websites,
which was also a
trippy video series
she shot in 2021.
Jen Granito
and her team spent a lot of time talking with publishers, journalists, and academics about
critical issues around the news ecosystem, working together and increasing transparency to better
meet users’ needs.
Ecommerce played a big part in
Alan Kent‘s life in 2021. He’s spent
lots of time shopping for things he doesn’t need and
writing about his experiences, and then
longing more for shopping. May we attribute to him that
20% of the internet consists of shopping sites?
We might never know, however
ecommerce sites certainly have more resources
that can help them serve their users better, while being search friendly also.
Daniel Waisberg was really
excited about the
Search Console
developments (surprise!). We added
several new functionalities to the
product,
improved data quality,
and increased how much data we share externally. We launched the
Google News report (more data!)
and made it available through the
Search Analytics API along with Discover data.
We also built a whole
new experience that joins data from
Search Console and Google Analytics with a goal to make it easier to understand content
performance.
What are you looking forward to in 2022?
As for aspirations for 2022, the answers were as diverse as for the previous question. Jen is
thinking about content, such as local news, that’s critical to underrepresented and marginalized
audiences, since local news is often more trusted than nationwide news outlets
according to a study by the Knight Foundation.
Daniel wants to help make SEO even more data driven by making Search Console data easier to
understand and widely available. He believes we can make the data we share more powerful not only
by providing more of it, but also by sharing best practices when it comes to debugging,
monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing Search traffic.
Alan continues to focus on ecommerce and his mission to organize the world’s ecommerce sites and
help them become generally available and more useful. We are ordering more credit cards for him in
the meantime to make his dreams come true.
But perhaps most importantly, we all would really, really love to see some people face to face at
events. Even Gary.
What was your most memorable moment of 2021 and what are you hoping for in 2022? Tell us on
Twitter using the
#2022withGSC hashtag.