Google Discover Feed — A review

The Google discover feed provides highly relevant content. This is what many professionals believe, including Mordy Oberstein, Wix’s official liaison.

To find out its impact, Mordy spent two consecutive months analyzing and examining the whole feed. Let’s see what he discovered.

Google Discover Feed -An analysis

In the initial five days of his examination, Mordy figured out all sorts of tactics to determine user behavior. He then applied the very same technique to check its influence on discover feed.

He studied various options such as mobile, reaching directly, clicking on results, and other sorts. The sole purpose was to check the aftermath of Google’s behavior and how it affects the discover feed.

Moreover, he went on websites he wasn’t able to reach before, limiting the search behaviors to maintain a difference.

For instance, he never liked celebrity news and gossips. But to check its impact, he visited the website, People.com several times a day. The purpose was to check if the related information appears on his discover feed or not.

Mordy did other similar activities and recorded the behavior of the feed one by one. An informal list of all the acts done and behaviors recorded is as follows:

• Search several random topics on Youtube
• Watched the whole video
• Scrolled and spent few minutes on every page just to see if Google would notice.
• Then the parent category of the videos showed up in his feed.

All these deductions were based on his one-month experimentation on Google Discovery Feed.

The Key Takeaways from the First Experiment

Based on Mordy’s Examination on Google Discover Feed, we can ask the following questions:

• Does Google prefer entertainment news over sewing videos? Yes.
• Does searching for topics irrelevant with time, such as searching for theatres during the lockdown, influence the decision? Yes.

All the results were not exclusive and may differ from individual experimentation. There is no fixed pattern. Therefore, results may vary as per the conduct.

Impact of User Behavior on Discover Feed

The results are not conclusive and wholly dependent on a unique-user profile. As already mentioned, Mordy’s purpose was to find out how user behavior impacts the feed and how frequently Google displays content based on user behavior.

Another survey was conducted by Mordy to find out more results. He went to Japan.times.co and searched for the lawn. From there, he watched videos with different contents.

Here’s what he found out:

• Watching videos on mobile had no impact on his feed. However, it does impact his YouTube feed.
• Watching videos on the desktop impacted the feed greatly, maybe because of the URLs.
• Simply watching without clicking anything serves no purpose.
• Searching through the desktop and accepting cookies from various sites effectively popped out more content.

Watching Youtube videos on mobile doesn’t necessarily show no impact.

It does, but it only shows in the ‘discover more’ tab.

If you want to receive a rich impact, you must watch more than one video a day. Hence, Mordy carried out another survey asking his two children to watch a ton of videos on YouTube.

One searched about birds and weather, and the other one looked up for airplanes. And guess what? YouTube threw several videos containing the same categories.

And this is what this experimentation is all about! To check which content Google takes more seriously and displays accordingly.

Google gave out different results on every survey he had. Therefore, it was kind of a difficult task to deduce the actual products. But Google shows other behavior when an individual uses mobile than desktop.

Hence, the two cannot be compared. But indeed, Google is quicker to display results searched via desktop than mobile.

What is Behind the Desktop Discover Feed Dominance?

After identifying the impact of user behavior on the discover feed, Mordy took up another experiment. He decided to search for things that he has never searched for and see what happens.

In this experiment, he started liking things as well. Mordy began liking two football teams’ photos and videos and searched Dallas Cowboys on desktop and Miami football team on mobile.

After a month, ten results show Cowboys and six outputs for Miami. The current set of data again showed a disparity between the desktop and mobile.

Yet, it’s too early to judge. The most liked and watched videos are not the sole factor behind the game. There is more to it. However, Mordy does not want us to focus on this factor alone.

He wants us to ponder the relationship between user behavior and the inclusion of results in the feed. Surprisingly, the numbers were pretty consistent in all experiments.

And now is the turn of the most exciting parts of his experiment.

Visited URLs absent from Discover

There was another thing missing from his discovery feed — the URLs. He saw the Food Network’s website forty times — watching, liking, and saving videos, but none of them popped up. Not just that, zero stuff related to food or cooking was part of his feed.

Another instance came where Google threw similar URLs and not the same he visited.

The only sites that showed up on his feed were ESPN and people.com that he visited religiously. But maybe that is because they offer some top content.

Few of the sites containing COVID information and that too visited regularly showed on his feed. Why is that so? Is Google being biased? It seems like it took a lot of time for Google to think about what the user wants to see as discover posts. It does not want to show content based on URLs.

Interesting, but simultaneously, it led him to another question.

Google Discover Feed and the SEO

Does SEO optimization play a significant role in the discovery feed?

Google doesn’t care about URLs. Moreover, there is no such concept of creating Discover-specific content.

But one clear fact to ponder about is the need to be authoritative and relevant to make your site appear in the discover feed of others.

This can only be done by creating unique and quality content as per the Google guidelines. It more sounds like content marketing than SEO, but it is what it is.

Relevant read: Top 7 content marketing trends to watch in 2021

A Blend of Content, Marketing, and SEO

Based on Mordy Obersten's discovery, several factors play a role in Goole Discover Feed.

Google focuses on finding quality content, ranking the site, perfect marketing strategies, and SEO.

Mere URLs or frequent searches are not the only ingredients in the dish of discovering feed. An ideal piece of content, a bunch of SEO blended with marketing, is all that makes it discoverable.