Thursday, May 27, 2021
Google I/O is our annual developer
festival, and this year it was all virtual. But as with any events, virtual, or in-person, a lot
of information was covered over the three-day event. In case you missed it, here is a list of some
Search-related news and announcements that might be of interest to you.
The keynote covered how
Google aims to be helpful in moments that matter. Sundar announced a
new product
development milestone called Multitask Unified Models (MUM), which builds on open, existing AI
architectures to solve complex info challenges. MUM is able to cross-train across many languages
and tasks to better understand information. Advances in this area will help us better understand
queries as well as pages on the web. These changes are not live yet, and you don’t need to make
any updates on your website for this. Other Search features that are next on the horizon include
Google Lens, AR in Search,
and About this Result.
For SEOs and developers, a good place to start is our What’s
new in Search video. In this talk, you’ll hear about two new schema markups available for
video content. Clip markup is now available to
any site with videos, and SeekToAction
markup is in beta. These markups can enable Google to display key
moments for your videos in Search.
To help developers prepare for the
upcoming ranking change, we hosted a
Page Experience technical session, including an
announcement for how we’re using page experience for desktop Google Search results.
During one of the meetups, Google announced Follow
on Chrome Canary in the US. Follow is an experimental feature designed to allow people to
follow the websites they care about, from large publishers to small neighborhood blogs, by tapping
a Follow button in Chrome. This meetup covered audience engagement and following publisher
websites across the web. There was a discussion about the feature Google has been developing in
this space with the web publisher and developer community.
We also hosted several sessions about Core Web Vitals:
To learn more about how to create more modern content on the web, check out
Immersive storytelling on
the web.
Although virtual, there were opportunities to mingle with other SEOs during the event. There was
a Search area in the Web dome on I/O Adventure. In addition, we also hosted Technical SEO show
and tells and meetups, and it was nice to see people from all over the world attend these networking
and Q&A sessions hosted by Martin Splitt.