Announced last week, Google will be including discussion and forum posts on certain topics in their search results - big news for any community-focused companies. Seems the boffins have spotted that people hanker after learning what other people think. Who’d have thought?
Claiming their move “originates from people’s desire for more first-hand advice”, Google are initially offering this service only on mobile devices in the US and are evidently kicking it off mainly with the mega-forums. But if it’s successful (for them), hard to imagine that they won’t roll it out to other territories and platforms. Hopefully, they’ll also include smaller and niche forums.
Clearly this is a big potential win for searchable forums and community focused businesses – elevating the profile and impact opinions and advice can have.
It doesn’t take a financial wizard to work out why Google felt the need to make this change: for years they must have been painfully aware how much traffic they were losing to Tiktok, Reddit etc. But if you want to try analysing their decision process, maybe try searching under “better late than never.”