Tag Archive for: disruption

How AI is Disrupting Google Search?

How AI is Disrupting Google Search?

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 A good view from Eric Enge on how Google is improving its search result quality with Rankbrain – its newish AI powerered algorithm.

However, and it’s a big however, 50% of new millennials don’t use search at all – they are simply told stuff by other people – combined with AI assistants like SIRI and Google NOW being pre-emptive. . . search may actually be decreasing. . .

From Fast company: “A new study offers a peek behind the scenes at how Google structures its search results. The study focuses on how Google’s RankBrain algorithm, which was first announced in October 2015, parses the English language. It’s one of the most detailed efforts to understand the algorithm to date.

“Google improved in about 55% of the queries that they didn’t understand back in July of 2015,” study author Eric Enge told Fast Company. “Honestly, I think that’s pretty amazing.”

Enge, who works for marketing consulting firm Stone Temple, focused on how RankBrain works compared to other Google machine learning products. He then made inferences on RankBrain’s behavior and results, which is something Google has not extensively discussed publicly.

In order to conduct the study, Stone Temple compared a sample set of 1.4 million pre-RankBrain queries to Google’s current search engine. They then analyzed a small remnant of search queries from the older set for which Google didn’t provide appropriate results.

After the launch of RankBrain, 54.6% of search queries that previously returned irrelevant results began returning appropriate results.

Some of these hard-to-resolve searches included queries like “What is low in the army” (Where the searcher is believed to have been searching for “what is low rank in the army”) and “Why are PDFs so weak” (Which, in the older version, first showed PDFs with the word “weak” rather than results about the security of PDF files). Stone Temple also saw what appear to be improvements surrounding specific phrases like “What is,” “Who is,” and “Where is.”

“We also found certain specific classes of phrases they handle better,” Enge said. These certain misspellings, such as when users misspell “Qatar” (the country) as “Cutter.”

One of the things Enge emphasized in the report is that he believes RankBrain has a negligible effect on SEO. He writes that it “simply (does) a better job of matching user queries with your web pages, so you’d arguably be less dependent on having all the words from the user query on your page.” The biggest changes from RankBrain, he added, have to do with increasing search quality and creating a likely framework for Google to apply further machine learning improvements to its search engine”

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Source John Straw

Uber Yourself Or Get Kodaked.

Uber Yourself Or Get Kodaked…

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Apple easy, Google fast: The experience management culture

Technology has taken centre stage in the success of companies today. With the likes of Uber, Amazon, and Deliveroo changing the way we live, shop, work and consume content, innovation is happening faster than ever before. In light of economic uncertainty, it’s become even more vital for businesses to deploy cutting-edge technology to maintain competitiveness.

Over the course of the next year, board-level conversations will be dominated by ways to ensure a seamless customer experience, formulating tactics to embrace disruptive technologies, as well as grappling with the implications of the future workplace. 

Digital disruption is affecting nearly all businesses:
Consumers can now order a meal, book a taxi and do their shopping with a few clicks of a button, without even leaving their living rooms. As a result, customers are increasingly expecting services to be ‘Apple Easy’ and ‘Google Fast’ in all aspects of their lives, demanding quick and seamless experiences across the board.

Customer experience management will continue to be a driver of success across all sectors in 2020. For many organizations, this means going back to the drawing board and incorporating customer-centricity at the core of their business models. As digitally native brands take a data-driven approach to provide frictionless experiences, customers will no longer tolerate dated technology with legacy systems and antiquated processes.

In the retail sector for instance, roughly 93 percent of UK internet users are expected to do online shopping by 2021, the highest online shopping penetration rate in Europe. However, as the e-commerce market becomes increasingly saturated, and the high street continues to decline, customer experience will be the central factor to help incumbent brands cut through the noise in the market.

Experience management extends beyond the end user to include other important stakeholders such as suppliers, partners and employees. Over the next 12 months, companies will increasingly need to acknowledge the need for a close link between good employee experience and exceptional customer service.

Engaging and retaining employees requires a big shift in company culture. A data scientist might choose to work in Silicon Valley not just for the financial benefits but for the culture of innovation it fosters and the opportunities to grow.

This results in companies such as Facebook and Uber – already excelling at customer experience – attracting the best talent. To avoid this brain drain, companies must look to emulate this culture and provide similar opportunities on this side of the pond, creating a superior experience for their employees.
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Source:  Marcell Vollmer

Indian market is ripe for online advertising disruption, says Criteo research

Indian market is ripe for online advertising disruption, says Criteo research

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Key Insights:

  1. 49.4% of Indian survey participants stopped shopping from a brand that they were loyal to before because of poor customer service
  2. 83.3 % said YouTube helps them most to discover new brands
  3. 60.9% would try a new brand for the first time because it provides a discount that is personalized and relevant, and this also appears to be the best way to gain customer loyalty
  4. 44.4% strongly agree that their purchasing decision is affected by a company’s mission/values
  5. Customer service is still key as it is the main reason for remaining with a brand (62.3%), or for leaving if customer service is poor (49.4%)
  6. Consumers are least loyal to Groceries brands and are most loyal to Jewelry & Luxury Goods

The online shopping market in India holds tremendous potential as it has some of the largest consumer segments across each e-commerce category, and it is focused on innovation, research, and development, making it one of the leading e-commerce markets in the world. Advertising and technological advancements have led to better-personalized experiences as it allows the communication of hyper-personalized messages that resonate with the target customer.

Criteo, the advertising platform for the open Internet, unveiled the survey report titled ‘Why We Buy’.
The survey was conducted across 10 countries, with over 10,000 respondents split almost evenly over all countries. The report in respect of India highlights that 90% of Indian consumers are willing to consider a new brand across all the shopping/product categories, which is the highest compared with consumers from the other countries surveyed.

The report gave us insights into how consumers discover brands, with Omnichannel discovery on YouTube, Facebook and websites as the top channels – but they were far from being the only source. Relevance makes a difference- 66% of Indians like that online ads can help them in discovering new products, while 57% like online ads for reminding them of products they’re interested in, and 51% like that online ads offer discounts for products.

It has been phenomenal to witness the Indian consumer behavior and we are glad to share this on a larger platform for the benefit of the Indian advertising industry which has evolved from being a small-scale business to a full-fledged industry. It has been phenomenal to witness the advancements of technological innovation in advertising over the years. The shift of ad spending from traditional to digital media is happening at a rapid pace. The advertising and marketing sector in India is expected to enjoy a good run. Growth is expected in a retail advertisement, on the back of factors such as several players entering the food and beverages segment, e-commerce gaining more popularity in the country, and domestic companies testing out the waters”, Siddharth Dabhade, MD, Criteo India, said.

Source: Criteo