GOOGLE HAS STARTED TO INTRODUCE USER POLLS INTO ITS SERP (SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE) IN ORDER TO BUILT TRUST INTO ITS SEARCH RESULTS.
Following last night’s (4th February 2018) Super Bowl LII, we searched Justin Timberlake (on our lunch break of course) and were surprised to see a poll embedded into the search results asking users to select their favourite song from his new album ‘Man of the Woods’. This worked for both desktop and mobile.
Having pulled in trusted answers from community forms and discussion sites like Reddit, we can only speculate as to what this new user polls SERP addition is for. The data collated could be used to influence future searches around this artist. For example, it may influence the order of YouTube videos from this artist in playlists or the carousel. By voting, it indicates that you have either purchased or listened to the album, potentially giving advertisers a chance to focus their attention on you with Timberlake’s back catalogue or tour dates.
This development follows on from sightings (not of the alien variety) in Google from across the SEO community of new trust indicators being added to third party content within the search results. For example, Google adds ‘Best Answer’ or other trust indicators to search results from web forums, discussion groups or social platforms.
As you can see above from an example, the snippet included the original question, the best response from a web forum and the number of ‘votes’ that the question had received from users of that particular forum.
Community Feedback to Play Bigger Role
It wouldn’t be difficult for Google with its huge pool of data to determine the most popular song from Justin Timberlake’s new album. It has access to YouTube engagement data, search data and access to third party data, such as record sales, charts and streams.
In its bid to become the go to site and search engine for all answers – and sometimes answers for questions you didn’t think of asking – Google is pulling in data from numerous sites to improve its own user experience (UX). This poll snippet is perhaps a sign of how it is trying to further personalise search results on an individual level.
We tried this search for other current artists, events and films, but to no avail. Whether it will be rolled out across other searches and whether it will be applied to commercial searches longer term remains to be seen. What this does for SEOs is suggest that a bigger focus on community feedback and content is going to play a big role in the user search journey.