The blogosphere has had a simple recipe for the past decade. You create a blog rich with information and publish it online. Google’s sophisticated bots take over and figure out what your blog is about. Google’s search engine drives traffic to the site while the information you’ve published is stored on Google’s servers to answer simple questions its search users might have.
Future Of Blogging – Chatbots
This formula has worked well for years. Users get answers at the click of a button, Google gets advertising revenue, and your site gets traffic. But the coming wave of artificial intelligence could be set to change that.
From Longtails to Chatbots
Google is pretty good at answering straightforward questions right on its homepage. You can search for anything from Elon Musk’s net worth to Tom Cruise’s weight. It’s the quickest way to get accurate statistics and data. For more complicated searches, Google directs you to a blog or website with more information. So, if you wanted to know what Control Cable is used for, you would be redirected to a technical blog with all the details.
The system relies on long-tail keywords gathered from millions of blogs across the Web. It works really well, but sometimes even Google search and technical blogs fall short. Some questions need more personalized answers. Legal, medical, and accounting questions need to be answered by a professional. There’s simply no ‘right ’ answer.
That’s where chatbots come in. In the near, future chatbots could, with a little help from Google, assist you in finding precisely the right pieces of information and put it into context. Natural language processing helps bots understand the way we speak, so it can pick up the meaning of your query and return a hyper-specific piece of information.
This makes searching for information interactive easier. Instead of typing, “best way to draft a CV,” we may be looking at a future where a chatbot asks you what your qualifications are and comes back with a hundred jobs in your area suited to your skill. You could simply ask a bot what you should wear tonight and it will throw up images of celebrities that look like you to show you what they’ve worn to help you pick the best outfit.
A Shift In Content Consumption
Chatbots have already started taking over financial advice, legal advice and foreign language tutoring services. Soon this new technology could replace blogs and articles altogether. That’s because bots can provide the information and storytelling with personal context. Instead of static information that needs to be discovered, chatbots could do the grunt work of sifting through data and telling us only what we need to know.
As chatbots and AI go mainstream, users will start consuming data differently. This marks a shift in content creation and consumption. 🙂
