Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi, ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordswordsPeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about Google Patents and how we can explore them to better understand how Google Search works. Okay, so what is a patent? To start with, here's a definition. A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something or offers a new technical solution to a problem. To get a patent, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application. In a nutshell, this means that if a company wants to protect something that they've invented, to prevent other companies from using this invention, they have to essentially disclose what the details of their invention is to the patent office, who will then either grant or deny the patent, but in doing so, they have to actually publicly disclose it. This means that you can actually go and look at patents to learn how an invention works, and Google themselves are actually really keen on patenting lots of inventions that can be incorporated into their search. Google themselves actually have well over 100,000 patents. Now, not all of these cover search, because obviously they've got other products, like their Android operating system and mobile phones and all sorts of things. So there's a huge number of patents that don't necessarily apply directly to search, but there are lots of patents that they have put forward over the past 20 years or so that do definitely relate to search. So, with SEO being such a black box in so many respects where we can't see under the hood of Google, this gives us an actual opportunity to take a bit of a peek inside to see how they might well have set up things to work as part of their search process. Well, have set up things to work as part of their search process. Some of them you can definitely see from reading them yes, this is how they're actually doing it. Others are a little bit more fuzzy, but it still surprises me that so few SEOs actually look at and discuss the content of these patents, because it's one of the few opportunities to actually see how Google actually thinks and how things actually work.

Speaker 1: 3:39

Now I'll be the first to admit that Google patents are not necessarily easy to read. They generally will need a few read-throughs to get a sense of how they work. They also can be quite technical, so it helps if you've got a technical background in some cases, but in many they're actually quite. After a few reads you can actually start to to pick up what they're trying to say and how they work, especially if it's for something that you can clearly see in operations such as, say, autocomplete or people also ask. So if you want to start finding some patents, google themselves actually make it quite easy to find patents of any kind because they've got a patent search engine which you can find at patentsgooglecom and in there you can just go in and just if you type google in the box and select the drop down search assignee google, you will find thousands and thousands and thousands of results all from google. Um, now, yeah, there's a lot to wade through there, so probably your best bet is to go online and just search. You know, do a google search in the normal google for google search patents, and there's lots of websites out there where people have found relevant patents and sort of deconstructed them and explained them in layman's terms for you. So I'd strongly recommend trying that. Another great starting point is the website SEObytheseacom by the late Bill Swaski. Bill did a lot of work over many years diving into different Google search patents and it's a really good starting point. Unfortunately obviously not updated since Bill died, but I would start there in the first instance.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Now, at Keywords People Use, we spend a lot of time looking at patents, especially when we're developing any new functionality or trying to understand any part of the search experience that we're trying to incorporate into our product. So I'm going to talk through now a particular patent and I'll link to this patent in the show notes so you can have a read of it and have a look at it and it's one that basically pertains to generating related questions for search queries, and if you read through this, you'll soon clearly see that this is the actual patent that describes how the people also ask questions are generated for search queries, and obviously that's what we base the people also ask search mining from on keywords people use. So when you do a search there and we mine the top level questions and the questions lower level than that, and then a deeper search, even lower level, this is how we are able to understand how people also ask questions are generated and how we can make claims on yeah, the relevancy of these questions that come up, how google does it and how they are ranked. Now, looking at the patent itself, we can see that it was filed in 2015, which fits when People Also Ask, actually was implemented into the Google search results and it was actually granted by the patent office in 2017. It always takes about 18 months or so for a patent to go from filing to application being granted, so it fits within the timeline. So we know that it is related to People Also Ask and if we actually look at the application itself, they actually show sort of wireframe screenshots of how it works and you can see yet how um it fits the model of what we see with with um, with people also ask questions in the google search results. So we can be fairly confident that what's covered by this application is actually how the system itself is working underneath and some of the core things we can see from this, which is that there is actually it's part of Google's infrastructure an actual question database, and they talk about this question database and how they populate this database with questions that people ask on subjects. It also discusses how these subjects are grouped into topic sets, which feeds into thoughts on topical authority.

Speaker 1: 8:14

So you can see from this how Google has got this question database on its backend, which takes questions that people ask all over the web and it correlates them into different topic sets and different subjects. And we can see further down the beta application how the process works so we can see how it will take the query that someone puts in. It will bring back the results of those pages that have been returned. It will identify questions that match the topic sets that also match those pages. So you can see how google is classifying pages in a topical authority and then it's going to its question database and finding the questions that match that topical authority. It'll then rank the matching questions, remove equivalent questions from the ranking, so ones that are too close together or exact duplicates of each other, and then it will sort those related questions based on a ranking criteria, which is the frequency of which that question is asked. So we can see that the volume um of questions is in is hierarchically stacked. So the first ones that return for people to ask are the higher volume ones and then subsequently the ones below them are ranked off each one of those so they have the intent proximity to each one. So we know that those subsequent questions are related to the question higher up in the hierarchy and subsequently they're ranked by volume each other way down.

Speaker 1: 9:51

Now that explanation based on the patent isn't the easiest thing to understand. I appreciate that, which is why I would strongly suggest you go and read that patent to sort of get more detail on it. But we know from our experience that if you break it down, what it essentially says is the people also ask. Questions that are shown for any query are topically relevant to the search results that you get for that query, which means that if you want to rank for that query, then it's a really good starting point to start building content around. Those people also ask questions because they are the questions that people in the real world are actually asking Google about those topics. And we also know that the higher the frequency a question is asked, the higher up the People Also Ask. Tree, it will appear.

Speaker 1: 10:45

So the first ones you see are the ones with the most volume and then as you click out through them and go further down the tree, from each node you will get the details of each question that needs to be answered within that. That's why we built the People Also Ask search into Keywords People Use. So if you've not tried doing our People Also Ask search, just go to keywordspeopleusecom. You don't have to sign up, it's free to try, and you can do a People Also Ask search on any any topic search term. Just put it into the search box, click search and within about 30 seconds you will receive a beautifully presented graph that shows all the questions and then the related questions underneath them. Our system essentially goes to google. It performs a search and it will then click through all the questions to actually find the related questions within each People Also Asked question, and it's an incredible way of visualizing the results.

Speaker 1: 11:46

People Also Asked. You can also get the data, download the data so you can manipulate it. We also cluster the data as well. The key thing is you can get that data in seconds on any subject for all the questions people are asking around any subject. So that's one example of how you know, we've used google patent research to truly understand an element of search and then implement it into our seo work. And, as I say, there is, there are thousands and thousands of these patents out there, but they're an incredible resource to truly understanding what's going on underneath the hood of google.

Speaker 1: 12:30

A few words of caution, though. Google may not patent everything that they put into search. So just because something isn't in a patent doesn't mean that it's not potentially possible to have been implemented. And likewise they may also patent stuff which they then actually never actually use. So again, just because it's in a patent, always take it with a pinch of salt. Always try and look back and see how it actually compares to how things appear to work in real life. The people so ask. One just went through. That's a really good example of one where you can actually see how it works in practice and and how this has been done and how it's implemented, so you can be reasonably confident on that one. Other ones confidence levels might not be so high, but you know, it's just always always think before completely believing something in a patent has actually been implemented in the real world. I hope that's given you something to think about when it comes to researching how Google actually works under the hood, patents are a great place to start and can often help cut through some of the myths that are out there and actually see how it actually works under the hood.

Speaker 1: 13:42

Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is Not that Hard. Is brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See why episode of SEO is Not that Hard.