The Future of Search

Voice search, chatbots, wearables, AI. Every year brings a new thing you supposedly have to start on right now. Wil Reynolds has worked in search since August 1999, runs the 200-person agency Seer Interactive, and has almost half a terabyte of client search data at his fingertips. In this talk he apologises for advice he gave on stage without data and shows how to look at the future of search through your own data instead of your gut.

You'll learn why Google lets human signals override algorithmic ones, how Wil uses accidental "OK Google" queries to estimate which industries should care about voice search, and why one client's long tail grew from 4,492 to 57,000 unique queries in eleven years. He shows what turns up once PPC, SEO and tool data sit in one data warehouse: $35,000 wasted on searches for cruise ship deck plans, or 27 % of women's product searches landing on pages outside the women's section.