Our friends over at Google have never been ones to stay still and they are certainly not predictable. Whether it be turning the world of SEO upon its head with the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, inventing the world’s first ‘smart’ spectacles in Google Glass or making the world a whole lot trippier with their Deep Dream neural network, they seem to thrive on coming up with new ways to surprise us.
This week they made one of their more shocking announcements in recent times by stating that Google as a trading entity is to become Alphabet. Google is no more!
Well, that’s not strictly true. Google the search engine will now just be one of the many subsidiaries of the umbrella company called Alphabet, alongside the various other operations and acquisitions that Google have been developing over the years, such as Android, YouTube, Nest and hundreds of others.
According to the blog post by Google’s head honcho Larry Page entitled ‘G is for Google’, which announced the changes, the reasoning behind the change was to make the company “cleaner and more accountable”.
Why the name Alphabet though? When you read ol’ Larry’s explanation, it’s actually a very clever and well thought out piece of branding. “We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!”
Never ones to stick to convention, even the company’s web address is cool. It’s http://abc.xyz. Although some people seem to have missed that memo and according to a recent report, the website www.alphabet.com saw a 5000% increase in web traffic after the initial announcement. Unfortunately for Google/Alphabet, that web address actually belongs to BMW and has nothing to do with the search engine giant.
So what will the changes mean for SEO and content marketers? For now, it seems, nothing much. Google will keep operating as normal as the world’s biggest search engine while Alphabet concentrates on expanding the million and one other ventures they have in the pipeline.
That said, this is Google so who knows what further changes may be round the corner that will have a bigger impact on search based marketing?
