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What Small Business Can Learn From Google’s Knowledge Graph

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Google recently rolled out an update to their search engine called the Knowledge Graph. The knowledge graph aims to improve a users experience by helping them discover new information quickly and easily. The knowledge graph takes into account the fact that when you search for a phrase, you are not just searching for a combination of words but you are searching for things – people, landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art, etc. By focusing on “things rather than strings”, Google hopes to help you find the information you need more quickly. By using the collective intelligence of the web the search engine can begin to understand the world a bit more like people do.

So what does all of this have to do with small business? While I am sure there will be much speculation to come about how all of this will effect SEO, I think the real lesson is Google’s focus on continually improving the experience of their users (customers). For their search engine, this means helping you find what you are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

Does your small business have that type of focus? Do you continually look for ways to help your customers solve the problems you help them with faster and easier? I know I can always improve in this area.

One of the features of the knowledge graph update is a mechanism to ask the user what they meant by a seemingly ambiguous phrase. If you search for “Taj Mahal” you may have meant the monument, the singer, or the casino – so the search engine will ask you which you meant (click on image to enlarge)

Small business owners don’t need a team of Google engineers to build feedback mechanisms to help them improve their products and services. Sometimes we can get bogged down in all of the different and complicated ways we can solve a question when all we really need to do is ask questions.

Let’s all take a cue from Google and work to ask questions and collect feedback to help us continually improve how we serve our customers.

If you are interested in learning more about the Knowledge Graph, watch this quick video from the folks at Google.

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Categories : Small Business Marketing

Tags : customer experience, google

Google Maps Now Includes Weather

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Google recently partnered with the folks at weather.com added weather information to their maps application (http://maps.google.com), making it dead simple to quickly get weather information.

Google uses a new layer to display weather information. Even if you don’t call them that, you are probably familiar with layers – have you played with the satellite or terrain views of Google Maps? Those are layers. If you hold you mouse over the satellite box at the top right corner of the map, you will see a drop down menu like the one below:

Clicking on the Weather item will toggle the weather layer on and off. When it is on, you will see weather icons on your map, as well as some information from nearby cities. Here is my local weather map this morning:

(click the image for a larger view)

You can also click on any of the weather icons on the map do get a mini 5 day forecast for that area:

For a more detailed forecast, click on any of the blue links you see in the pop up window to be taken to the weather.com site.

How could you use this for marketing? Maps with the weather layer cannot be embedded in your website, at least not now. However, you can email a link that, when clicked, will pull up the map with the weather layer enabled. This could be a nice tool to use for your business if the weather effects your customer experience – for example, if you own a bed and breakfast or are an event planner, letting you customers know what to expect from the weather before they pack for their trip can be a nice touch.

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