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Google Podcasts App and Making Podcasts Easier to Find

Podcasts Can Be Hard to Find

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. They can be fun to listen to while doing chores around the house, like watering plants, washing dishes, cooking meals, and cleaning up. There are podcasts on many different subjects that I am interested in. A good number about Search Engine Optimization.

Someone asked me If I had seen any patents about podcasts on Twitter recently. I hadn’t at the time and I told them that. A patent application later appeared on January 9, 2020. I returned to the tweet where I replied that I hadn’t seen any, and tweeted that I had found a new one, and would be writing about it. This is that post.

I am not the only one listening more to podcasts. Techcrunch from last year had an article about the growth of audiences for podcasts: After a Breakout Year: looking ahead to the future of Podcasting.

It seems Google noticed this trend and has worked on making podcasts easier to find in search results and by releasing a Google Podcasts app.

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Google News Recommendations and the Google Knowledge Base

Google News Recommendations

I’ve seen posts from SEO by the Sea show up in search results with an “In the News” heading above them, even though my site hasn’t officially been accepted in Google News. Some blog posts that have been given that “In the News” treatment have been criticized lately. See: Google does a better job with fake news than Facebook, but there’s a big loophole it hasn’t fixed. It seems that this criticism is going to have an impact, with the “In the News” label taken away from Google Search Results:

Google is removing its ‘In the news’ label due to the fake news nightmare

Are there any other solutions? I do like when something I write is treated as newsworthy and is presented to a larger audience in a way that helps those posts stand out, but sometimes satire blog posts end up being treated that way as well. This article points out some other possible solutions:

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New Visual Search Photo Features from Google

These details come from an anonymous source who also gave us a bit more details on the project. The report states there will be a new feature integrated, allowing users to outline specific areas of the image in order to directly target their searches.

Added 1/13/2020 – Google Goggles no longer exists, but many of the features that it had, and might have had added to it, such as the ability to focus upon objects within a photo are features that are included in Google Lens. I am updating this post to point to that app instead of Google Goggles.

In Google Goggles, one can only search the whole image, which has proven to bring plenty of discrepancies. Images often display plenty of distractions, background items and other objects that may throw off a search result. According to the sketch provided, the system will also be able to recommend retailers for purchasing products, as well as other details.

Furthermore, it is said this technology has also been tested in “wearable computing devices”. This could suggest this technology may come to products like Google Glass and possibly even VR (or AR) headsets.

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Image Search and Trends in Google Search Using FreeBase Entity Numbers

Google is organizing more and more things in its index based upon entity numbers. I have a couple of examples for you that show how they are being used.

It’s possible that you may have missed a reference to Freebase Entities in a Google Research Blog post from 2013. I missed it myself. The post is
Improving Photo Search: A Step Across the Semantic Gap.

In the post, the author (Chuck Rosenberg) tells us how they improve image searching at Google by labeling images with entities, rather than text strings. The entities they used are entities that you would find at a source such as Freebase. He tells us that they use Freebase Machine ID numbers for those labels:

As in ImageNet, the classes were not text strings, but are entities, in our case we use Freebase entities which form the basis of the Knowledge Graph used in Google search. An entity is a way to uniquely identify something in a language-independent way. In English when we encounter the word “jaguar”, it is hard to determine if it represents the animal or the car manufacturer. Entities assign a unique ID to each, removing that ambiguity, in this case “/m/0449” for the former and “/m/012×34” for the latter.

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Google Watch Times Algorithm For Rankings?

Google was granted a patent this week about how Google may rank some search results, by looking at watch times.

The patent appears to be aimed at video content, but it tells us that it might be applied to how long someone might watch a page after they’ve been delivered to the page, even if that page doesn’t contain video. The page may contain images or audio, and watch times for that content might be tracked as well.

Regarding videos, the patent tells us that a score might be adjusted for resources like videos based on how long people tend to watch that video content. That score might be boosted if people tend to watch the video for longer periods of time, and might be reduced if people historically tend to watch that video for shorter periods of time. This watch times score could be used to boost or demote a video in search rankings for a query.

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