DANNY SULLIVAN: Hello, and welcome to our first ever
Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit,
because no conference is good unless you can
have five words to go with it.
And that's how we describe it.
I am Danny Sullivan, the public liaison for Search.
Some of you may have known me from my previous life.
And let me tell you, it has been an interesting journey.
I did not expect to be doing a conference type of thing again.
And yet, here we are.
So I will try to reclaim all my older skills
and see if I can bring those back in with it.
We have a really great day planned.
I am super excited about this.
We have had events at Google.
Many times, we've had different SEOs, webmaster content
producers, and such come in.
But I don't think we've ever had anything
to this degree involving this many Googlers,
as you will see as we get started,
and we're really excited to have all of you as part of this.
Why are we having this event?
So it's really that we want to better increase our two-way
communication between people who work at Google Search and--
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
Sorry.
DANNY SULLIVAN: --you folks, and whoever's
calling on this phone.
No, it's totally, totally fine because it
happens to me as well.
So we have lots of feedback.
There's no end to the feedback we hear.
Here's John Mueller just getting feedback, feedback, feedback,
back-handing the feedback.
So we have our Office Hangouts.
We have feedback coming in there.
We have feedback that comes internationally,
multiple languages, all over the world, lots
of possible feedback.
And we really are thinking about the ecosystem,
the open web, et cetera, et cetera all the time.
And it really does come up.
In my time that I've been here, people
are like, what's it like working at Google?
Well, once they put me in the machine, they brainwashed me,
everything's been great since then.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
There's the small thing, like in "Clockwork Orange,"
and they held my eyes open, and then it was all fine.
No, no, it wasn't like that at all.
It's actually been like what I'd known
Google was like to be with, which
was a very thoughtful company that really does care
about these kinds of issues, and it does come up in meetings.
And we had this one thing that came up
where we had launched something, and then people
were slightly concerned, as almost never happens.
And I was saying, OK, I'll come in.
And by the way, we really do think about this stuff,
and everybody totally believed me.
They're like, oh, thank you.
I felt really reassured.
No, people are like, yeah, I believe it.
So no one really believed it.
But an example of this is the origin of this entire event.
So this is an email that Danielle Marchek sent out,
who you will see later on.
And by the way, there have been a lot of people involved
in this event, and we will not be thanking all of them
because it would go on for ages.
But Danielle has been a real hero of everything.
She has roped us all in and every week
said, get-- get-- get it.
And so now we are all here.
So she sent this email out--
I think it was March, maybe it was April-- saying, look.
We want to have this meet the ecosystem type of thing.
And Emily-- Emily Moxley, who you'll hear from later,
one of our senior people I mentioned--
thought this would be a good thing.
And this is coming down, coming out just organically-- ha,
organic--
from within Google saying, we would like
to have this type of thing.
It was not like, OK--
it's part of that thing that's already what's
going on with all the products.
So yeah, we do think about it all the time,
and this is one of those ways that it's coming out.
And then going back to that earlier thread
that I mentioned, so it came up, and I said, look,
we really do think about the ecosystem.
And, in fact, it's important.
If Google wanted to support the ecosystem-- because we really
do recognize that if we do not do that,
if the ecosystem isn't thriving, we can't thrive.
So it's that virtuous loop or however
you want to describe it.
It really is that our concerns are your concerns,
and your concerns are our concerns,
and kumbaya, whatever.
But the other, I think, big challenge [? is ?]
all this is that search has to keep evolving.
One nice thing is you all have job security, as you know,
because every day we'll just roll something else out
and you'll go, oh, that stuff has changed.
It's all different.
Bert changes everything, everything.
SEO-- it's dead.
No, it's none of those things.
So again, you can attribute to me that it's not dead.
But search has to keep evolving because, remember, you
turned on your computer, and you waited three minutes,
and then after it booted, you plugged in your modem,
and then you'd wait another three minutes.
Are there any children that don't remember what a modem is?
Because you're very lucky.
So that's how we searched and that's
how people got their stuff.
And this is how people are searching today.
They're on the back of bicycles with their phones.
I don't know if you've seen that, but this is true.
That's everywhere out there.
I see it all the time, people on the back of bicycle-- no.
People are searching.
They're on the move.
They're all ages.
They're constantly searching all sorts of ways.
So we have to keep search evolving.
Because if we don't keep doing it,
then people aren't going to be searching with us.
Now, how do we know as we evolve whether or not
we are still doing the right thing by the ecosystem?
And one thing could be, well, we'll look at traffic.
And one metric that we have of just one thing, in terms
of news, is, well, we send like 24 billion visits per month
to news sites, so that's a lot of visits.
So you'd think we're supporting news, as we hope that we are.
But if you just look at traffic, then you're
dealing with an imperfect measure.
Because let's take Bert here.
And here's before Bert, and someone did this search
for "I want to get medicine for someone at a pharmacy."
And before we had Bert, we would say, all right,
here's how you get medicine for yourself,
which sent that site traffic, but wasn't really answering
what the person was looking for, wasn't really providing what
they're-- and then afterwards, we're sending to a different
page at a different site that is actually saying, well,
this is how you can get medicine for someone else.
So traffic's been lost.
And you could say, well, now the ecosystem has been harmed.
And particularly, that site's been
harmed because they didn't get the visit they should
have gotten in the first place.
I was getting this visit.
Now I'm not getting this visit.
It's horrible.
But you were getting a visit, but was it actually a visitor
that was useful for you?
That's just one of the things you
have to consider when you look at all this stuff.
And I don't know all the answers to this,
and we don't know all the answers to this.
That's why we invited 200 of you all to come,
because we figured you know all the answers to this.
What is it?
No, anyway.
You can tell us later.
But one of the things we would like
to get is this sense of, well, how should we
assess if we're supporting the open web and the ecosystem?
What are some of the metrics we might want to be considering?
What are some of the ways that, to you, are
important to know whether or not we're
doing the right thing by both your sites
and that you would think of--
I know this is hard--
but sites in general?
What are the ways that Google can
improve our support overall?
We definitely want to understand that
as well, so that's part of all this that's going on here.
And really, anything that's on your minds at all,
we want to know.
That's why you're here.
So don't be shy, as I know that so many of you can often be.
I have seen your tweets.
I don't really want to say this--
and then you hold back-- so I won't.
No, we really want to hear everything from you,
so we are so, so glad to have you out here today.
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