Empathy · Principle 04 of 16
Understand the context
Type "python" into Google and you might want a snake or some code. Gary Illyes had just been playing with the snake.
A few days before I sat down with Gary Illyes at Big Digital in Adelaide, he'd been to Kangaroo Island. When I asked how Google works out what someone means, he used the trip as his example. He'd been playing with a python there, he said, "and I wasn't programming."
It's the clearest explanation of search intent I've heard. Type "python" and you might want a snake or a programming language, and Google leans on your search history to guess which.
Earlier in the same episode he gave an even sharper example.
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04
Understand the context
People don't always say what they mean. Work out what they're actually asking before you answer.
"'Can I beat Mario without using a walk-through?' Traditionally, for our algorithm, it was quite hard to understand 'without' in the query."
> i ignored the word "without" for years. explains a lot about my cooking.
Gary was explaining what RankBrain was good at. Drop the word "without" and you've answered the opposite question: someone who wanted to beat Mario on their own gets handed the walkthrough.
One word can flip the whole meaning
Google has kept working on this. In 2019 it wrote about understanding searches better than ever before, using a query about a Brazilian traveller needing a visa for the USA. The old systems missed the importance of the word "to" and showed results for Americans going to Brazil. Same problem as Gary's Mario, different small word.
We noticed the shift even earlier, back when Hummingbird arrived and Google started paying attention to syntax and word order rather than just matching keywords.
For those of us writing pages, the lesson runs the other way. Google has spent years learning to read small words carefully. Plenty of websites still don't. We write "affordable" when our customer is searching "cheap", or build a page for "business insurance" when the person is typing "do I need insurance for my side hustle". The words look close. The context is completely different.
We wrote about this in what New Coke can teach us about keyword research. The mistake is picking words based on what you think matters, instead of the concerns and vocabulary your customer actually has.
Tell the machine what you mean
Gary gave another example that every business owner should hear. If your page talks about Apple, is it the fruit or the company? Search engines have to guess unless you tell them. His suggestion was schema markup, which he said isn't very visible but helps "make sure that search engines understand the content well."
When Bobby asked me at the end what I'd change for voice search, my answer was the same: structured data, so Google knows which entities are on your site. If you sell products, tag them as products. Google's own introduction to structured data is the best place to start.
Voice is its own kind of context. Gary pointed out that people keep typed searches short because nobody likes typing on a phone, but they say full sentences out loud. The Big Digital session with Gary produced a line we wrote down at the time: "Read content out loud. If it sounds natural, rank brain = happy." Our piece on voice search goes further into writing for questions people actually ask.
Context includes where they're standing
Some of the most useful context has nothing to do with words. When I asked Gary about apps versus mobile sites, he backed the website, because an app adds a step: download it, install it, then maybe get your answer. With a website you get content as soon as you touch a result or a link someone shared on Facebook.
Think about the moment that describes. Someone mid scroll, on a phone, curious for about four seconds. Anything you put between them and the answer, whether it's an install prompt, a cookie wall or a slow hero video, is you ignoring where they are. Gary's own example was a news site that took about twenty seconds to load for him in Australia, which I've written about more in design for users.
Two things worth checking. Look through Search Console for queries with small words like "without", "vs", "near" or "not", and check the page ranking for each one answers that version of the question. Then load your site on your own phone, off wifi, somewhere with bad reception, and time it. Your customers aren't on the office wifi.
Gary's advice from inside Google was to focus on the user. Fair enough, but you have to know which user first, and what they meant when they typed it. Design for users picks it up from there, and there's more on Gary on his guest profile.