Friday, December 31, 2021
It's that time of year again: writing a blogpost about what happened during the year, and the aspirations for the year to come. Since writing is hard, we asked the Googlers who've authored for the Search Central Blog in 2021 to collaborate with us again, and to reflect on what was memorable and what they're excited about for 2022. Basically, this is their blog post.
What was a memorable moment in Search in 2021 that you'd like to share?
2021 was a wild ride, and that's represented by the responses we got for our questions as well. Some folks like John Mueller felt that certain tweets and websites were the most memorable things in 2021, along with the increased focus on speed. Both John and Jeff Jose were enthusiastic about Core Web Vitals, particularly how well it was received by the larger ecosystem and how folks got to work to make the web a better place for all.
Events were scarce in 2021, so we focused on producing podcasts and videos. Aurora Morales joined us on the Search Off the Record podcast for an episode about Sustainable Monetized websites, which was also a trippy video series she shot in 2021.
Jen Granito and her team spent a lot of time talking with publishers, journalists, and academics about critical issues around the news ecosystem, working together and increasing transparency to better meet users' needs.
Ecommerce played a big part in Alan Kent's life in 2021. He's spent lots of time shopping for things he doesn't need and writing about his experiences, and then longing more for shopping. May we attribute to him that 20% of the internet consists of shopping sites? We might never know, however ecommerce sites certainly have more resources that can help them serve their users better, while being search friendly also.
Daniel Waisberg was really excited about the Search Console developments (surprise!). We added several new functionalities to the product, improved data quality, and increased how much data we share externally. We launched the Google News report (more data!) and made it available through the Search Analytics API along with Discover data. We also built a whole new experience that joins data from Search Console and Google Analytics with a goal to make it easier to understand content performance.
What are you looking forward to in 2022?
As for aspirations for 2022, the answers were as diverse as for the previous question. Jen is thinking about content, such as local news, that's critical to underrepresented and marginalized audiences, since local news is often more trusted than nationwide news outlets according to a study by the Knight Foundation.
Daniel wants to help make SEO even more data driven by making Search Console data easier to understand and widely available. He believes we can make the data we share more powerful not only by providing more of it, but also by sharing best practices when it comes to debugging, monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing Search traffic.
Alan continues to focus on ecommerce and his mission to organize the world's ecommerce sites and help them become generally available and more useful. We are ordering more credit cards for him in the meantime to make his dreams come true.
But perhaps most importantly, we all would really, really love to see some people face to face at events. Even Gary.
What was your most memorable moment of 2021 and what are you hoping for in 2022? Tell us on Twitter using the #2022withGSC hashtag.