State Of Search 2015: Gary Illyes Keynote

The following is a live blog from State Of Search. Please pardon any typos or grammar issues as we really didn't have time for much proofing between sessions.

Closing off the day is Google's Gary Illyes.  After giving a disappointing look at many for not being HTTPS he moves on to chatting the future of Google ... Let's start with "what is search today":

• There at over 120 trillion URLs and many of them are duplicates
• The ranking happens in the SERP serving not the indexing so Caffeine had nothing to do with rankings
• He notes specifically, "I implemented the HTTPS boost for example."  So for those who question it ... there you have it - from the guy who help implement the boost.
• Gary worked to deprecate the "_escaped_fragment" and now it's gone.
• There are 100B indexed app pages
• 45% of Android queries result in an app result
• Structured data is important (in case you didn't know).  They aid in sitelinks and breadcrumbs.  They are also crucial in events.
• The mobile friendly updating happens during index but the reduction in ranking comes in the ranking.

Next year Google will be providing additional information about how to get features snippets, guides to how they work and new code. Now he's moving on to something cooler ... Google is working on understanding conversational search.

• What is the Empire State building?
• Where is it?
• Who built it?
• When?

This is a big breakthrough. To this end they have already launched Google Now.  This understands where you are and feeds you what it thinks you want at any given time. It is briding on to other apps so a text for "that martian movie" will be seen as a context so if you then click "Google Now" it will open to Martian movies that are playing where you can watch the trailer or book tickets.  If a restaurant is being mentioned it will open to reviews. Stat: 40% of people abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load.  This is because Generation Y has an attention span of 2.8 seconds.  He notes that a goldfish has an attention span of 8 seconds.  Let's really think about that. ;) Google AMP will be pushed aggressively.  (Writer's note: I've chatted about this on Webmaster Radio and folowed this one ... it's going to be a bit change for speed and development and you should read about it up here).