 Hello and welcome to our first ever Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit because no conference is good unless you can have five words to go with it. And that's how we describe it. I am Danny Sullivan, the Public Liaison for Search. Some of you may have know me from my previous life and let me tell you, it has been an interesting journey where I did not expect to be kind of doing a conference type of thing again and yet here we are. So I will try to reclaim all my older skills and see if I can bring those back in with it. We have a really great day planned. I am super excited about this. We have had events at Google for many times we've had different SEOs. Webmaster content producers and such come in, but I don't think we've ever had anything to this degree involving this many Googlers as you will see as we get started and we're really excited to have all of you as part of this. Why are we having this event? So it's really that we want to better increase our two-way communication between people who work at Google Search and you folks and whoever's calling on this phone. That was totally fine because it happens to me as well. So we have lots of feedback. Like there's no end to the feedback we hear. Here's John Mueller just getting feedback, feedback, feedback, backhanding the feedback. So we have our office hangouts, we have feedback that's coming in there. We have feedback that comes internationally, multiple languages all over the world, lots of lots of feedback. And we really are thinking about the ecosystem, the open web, et cetera, et cetera, all the time. It really does come up. Like in my time that I've been here, people are like, what's it like working at Google? Well, you know, once they put me in the machine, they brainwashed me. Everything's been great since then. No. There's a small thing like in Cockwork Orange and they held my eyes open and then it was so fine. No, no, it wasn't like that at all. It's actually been like what I'd known Google was like to be with, which was a very thoughtful company that really, you know, does care about these kinds of issues and it does come up in meetings. And we had this one thing that came up where we had launched something and then people were slightly concerned. It almost never happens. And I was like saying, well, okay, I'll come in and, you know, by the way, we really do think about this stuff. And everybody totally believed me. They're like, oh, thank you. I felt really reassured. No, people are like, yeah, I believe it. So, no, but so no one really believed it. But as an example of this is the origin of this entire event. So this is an email that Danielle Marshuck sent out who you will see later on. And by the way, there have been a lot of people involved this event and we will not be thanking all of them because it would go on for ages. But Danielle has been like a real hero of everything. She has roped us all in. And every week said, get it, get it. And so now we are all here. So she sent this email out. I think it was March. Maybe it was April saying, look, we want to have this sort of meat, the ecosystem type of thing. And Emily, Emily of the Emily Moxley, who you'll hear from later, one of our senior people I mentioned, thought this would be a good thing. And it's just like coming down, it's coming out just organically, organic, from within Google saying we would like to have this type of thing. It's not like, OK, it's part of that thing that's already in what's going on with all the products. So, yeah, we do think about it all the time and this is one of those ways that it's coming out. And then going back to that earlier thread that I mentioned. So it came up and I said, look, we really do think about the ecosystem. And in fact, it's important. Like, if Google wants to support the ecosystem because we really do recognize that if we do not do that, if the ecosystem isn't thriving, we can't thrive. So everybody, you know, it's that virtuous loop or whatever you want to, however you want to describe it, it really is that our concerns are your concerns and your concerns are our concerns and Kumbaya, whatever. So, but the other, I think, big challenge is all this, is that search has to keep evolving. Like, one nice thing is you all have job security, as you know, because every day we'll just roll something else out and you'll go, oh, that stuff has changed. It's all different. BERT changes everything, everything. SEO, it's dead. No, it's none of those things. So just, you know, again, you can attribute it to me that it's not dead. But search has to keep evolving because you remember, like, you know, you turned on your computer and you waited three minutes and then after it booted, you plugged in your modem and then you waited another three minutes. Are there any children that don't remember what a modem is? Because you're very lucky. So that's how we searched and that's how people got their stuff and this is how people are searching today. They're on the back of bicycles with their phones. I don't know if you've seen that, but this is true. That's everywhere out there. I see it all the time, people on the back of bicycles. No, people are searching. They're on the move. They're all ages. They're constantly searching all sorts of ways. So we have to keep search evolving because if we don't keep doing it, then people aren't going to be searching with us. Now, how do we know as we evolve whether or not we are still doing the right thing by the ecosystem? And one thing could be, what would look at traffic? And one metric that we have of just one thing in terms of news is, well, you know, we send like 24 billion visits per month to news sites. So that's a lot of visits. So you'd think we're supporting news as we hope that we are. But if you just look at traffic, then you're kind of dealing with an imperfect measure because let's take Burt here. And here's before Burt and someone did this search for I want to get medicine for someone at a pharmacy. And before we had Burt, we would say, all right, here's how you get medicine for yourself, which sent that site traffic, but wasn't really answering what the person was looking for. Wasn't really providing what they were. And then afterwards we're sending until a different page at a different site that is actually saying, well, this is how you can get medicine for someone else. So traffic's been lost. And you could say, well, now the ecosystem's been harmed and particularly that site's been harmed because they didn't get the visit they should have gotten in the first place, right? You know, I was getting this visit, now I'm not getting this visit, it's horrible. But you were getting a visit, but was it actually a visitor that was useful for you? That's just one of the things you have to consider when you look at all this stuff. And I don't know all the answers to this and we don't know all the answers to this. That's why we invited 200 of you all to come because we figured you know all the answers to this. What is it? No, anyway, you can tell us later. But one of the things we would like to get is a sense of, well, how should we assess if we're supporting the open web of the ecosystem? What are some of the metrics we might wanna be considering? What are some of the ways that to you are important to know whether or not we're doing the right thing by both your sites and that you would think of, I know this is hard, but sites in general. What are the ways that Google can improve our support overall? We definitely wanna understand that as well. So that's part of all this is going on here. And really anything that's on your minds at all, we wanna know, that's why you're here. So don't be shy, as I know that so many of you can often be. I have seen your tweets, I don't really wanna say this. And then you hold back, so I won't. No, we really want to hear everything from you. So we are so, so glad to have you out here today.