In this blog, we’ll take a deep look at what search will be like in the metaverse, and in case you aren’t familiar with the concept of the metaverse, let’s break things down. The metaverse is a general term for online spaces that allow people to act in more immersive ways. Typically one thinks of virtual reality, or VR, when they think of the metaverse.
Ready Player One
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Ready Player One”, that’s a pretty damn good depiction. 3D avatars, heads up displays showing critical information, all of it. The world was shocked when Facebook rebranded to Meta, signaling just how serious woocommerce seo experts near me should take the metaverse.
Metaverse
Many people are calling the metaverse the next phase of the internet; that’s a pretty big deal. In case we haven’t met before, my name is Matt Diggity, and I’m a search engine optimization professional. I’m about to explore what search might be like in the metaverse. When you’re running around virtual worlds with your custom avatar, how will you pull up information, and who will decide what information is displayed to you when you ask for it?
Interesting Questions Dive Traffic
These are all interesting questions which we’ll dive into in this blog, but first we’ll continue to look at what the metaverse is actually all about. The metaverse will run on what people are calling Web 3.0, the next quote unquote version of the internet. To understand it, let’s start from the beginning. Web 1.0 was the first version of the internet. Yes, very Captain Obvious statement. Web 1.0 was all about sites with a bunch of HTML, displaying content, images, and links to other 1.0 websites.
Doesn’t that kind of sound like what we have today? Not quite. Today, we have Web 2.0. Web 2.0 brought on a much higher level of interactivity. Most of the popular sites we practically live on today are Web 2.0. These sites are often based on communities, such as what we have with Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and more. Most of the content you find on Web 2.0 sites is user generated. The content you create lives on and is owned by the platform you engage with, which many people think is a problem.
Watching Youtube’s Blog
For example, you’re not watching my blog right now, you’re watching YouTube’s blog. The only thing you can really own in the Web 2.0 internet is a domain name. Now, with Web 3.0, you can legit own parts of the internet. Digital goods like real estate, currencies, avatars, art, music, in-game items, and even text-based content you can all literally own through blockchain, and more specifically, NFT technology. NFTs, otherwise known as non fungible tokens, live on top of blockchains like Ethereum.
NFT Like Cryptopunks
When you hear NFT, art projects like CryptoPunks, which are selling for millions a piece, come to mind. They provide a way to truly provide digital ownership of something. Things you create in the metaverse, you’ll actually own. Things you earn in the metaverse, you’ll own. And more importantly, you’ll be able to properly monetize them.
For example, a musician can create a song as an NFT, and code it into having the condition, whenever that song is sold to a new person, the original artist gets a 20% kickback. Not a record label, not Spotify; it goes straight to the musician. And because of this, musicians, artists, content creators, you will be highly incentivized to be present in and create in the metaverse.
Potential Renaissance
Just think about the potential renaissance of creative thought we might be on the cusp of. And by the way, if you like content like this, let me know by creating a new color for that like button. With a gentle tap, you’ll help my channel out a bunch. You’ll also be telling the YouTube algorithm you’re into nerdy stuff like this. Win-win. A common misconception is that the metaverse is exclusively about VR headsets and 3D worlds.
The truth of the matter is that we already have metaverses in 2D, and some of these metaverses are the most popular games on the planet. “Axie Infinity” is a game that already uses the blockchain and NFTs. Each of the “Axie” characters you battle with are NFTs, so is the end game currency. “Fortnite” is a metaverse in itself, and people do much more than just pew-pewing each other in “Fortnite”. The metaverse isn’t all about gaming. Rapper, Travis Scott, held a concert in “Fortnite” with 45 million attendees.
That’s Insane
Justin Bieber held an interactive concert in Wave, a virtual entertainment platform, but there’s way more use cases than this. You can meet online for work in virtual meeting rooms, and why hang out in Facebook groups when you can be virtually present at online conferences, discussing various topics and networking? There’s already virtual art galleries and virtual shopping outlets to deck out your avatar. Then we have Decentraland, a huge virtual world that is not owned by a big corporation, but by its users. In Decentraland, you can buy up and improve on virtual real estate, which you can actually own, build out, and use to your liking.
Maybe you want to open a virtual store, or maybe you just want a sweet metaverse pad to chill out in with your homeys. Now let’s start to think about how search is going to work in the metaverse. People will be spending hours per day in there, and they’re going to need information, but how will it actually be pulled up into your interface? Well, let’s think about how you do a search now. If you have a topic you need answers for, you open up your browser, type it into Google, and off you go. So typing is the norm, but typing sucks in the metaverse. If you’ve tried typing while using an Oculus or other VR device, you know what I mean.
Pointing And Clicking A Cursor At A Floating Keyboard Is Downright Infuriating
What you really need is to use your 10 fingers, but without some physical resistance, like the click of a key on a keyboard, it’s hard to know when you actually press something. You also need physical feedback to be able to know if your fingers are positioned in the right place on the keyboard. Until we have improved hand tracking technology and evolved haptic feedback gloves, I just don’t see us actually enjoying searching via typing anytime soon. Which brings us to voice search, which is actually quite useful if you’ve had the chance to play around with a device like Google Home. You ask a question like, “How tall is Bruno Mars?” And it tells you the answer.
Five Foot Five
By the way, he’s five foot five. You ask it to play Bruno Mars, and it opens up YouTube and drops “24K Magic” on you. You say something, your device says something back. There’s two disadvantages to the speak and response format. First, if you’re using voice search, it expects that you want to hear your answer in a short, punchy format. So it’s not very good at getting deep answers to questions like “What is compound interest?”
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What voice search usually does is read back to you what is shown in Google’s featured snippet for your question. The second disadvantage of voice search is that you typically get back one answer. You’re using voice search because you’re in your car or cooking a meal, and you can’t be fussed to type something in, so Google assumes that you don’t want to crawl through the bowels of the internet to find multiple answers for different opinions.
Spending A Massive Amount Of Time
If people are going to be spending a massive amount of time in the metaverse, they’ll need deep answers. They’ll also need multiple points of view to compare and contrast solutions. Luckily, we’re less limited with voice search in the metaverse. You can ask your question with your voice, but unlike how voice search is typically used today, what’s to stop a window from popping up within your heads up display that looks exactly like a Google search result page?
World Of Blockchain
With any luck, and the rise of open source, especially in the world of blockchain, we might even get a decentralized search engine with transparency on how it actually determines its search results. I also expect search to become highly personal. Depending on the online communities we hang out in, mood feedback from our haptic gear, and recent search history, you might get a completely different search result for the same search as someone else would.
But my hope is that this would be an optional setting, and people will actually have control over how their data is being used, because in a decentralized metaverse, you’ll own your data. We’ll also have visual search, which will be very useful in augmented reality. You’ll see someone driving around in a cool car, and your heads up display will tell you everything there is to know about it. Its price, horsepower, engine block, everything, and with a deeper dive, you can read real user reviews. Or when you travel to different countries, virtually or physically, each building will have its construction date, name of architect, and other historical data overlayed over them.
The Question Arises, Where Would This Overlay Data Come From?
Or when you ask important questions like “How do I get a cancer screening?” Where does the answer actually come from? In my opinion, at least for the foreseeable future, since all of this information already exists in the Web 2.0 internet, searching the metaverse will pull up answers from existing websites. Eventually all the information in the world will probably get ported over to blockchain. It makes sense, content creators would be incentivized to mint NFTs of their work. Taking myself, for example, I could write a blog post right now on my website, diggitymarketing.com, detailing a business strategy that’s been giving me some great results.
People would read it, enjoy it, and some even apply it to their own businesses. Or I could deliver something way better by creating NFTs of that same process, of which the owners of that NFT would be able to copy the exact process, software, and training needed to deploy it directly in their business with minimal resistance, and when they do so, I get a kickback. There’d be no pirating possible of the intellectual property.
Incentivized To Do The Latter
Let me tell you, I’d be much more incentivized to do the latter, but for now, the time and computational costs to upload all the information on the internet onto blockchains is unfathomable, especially since, currently, there’s so much more interesting transactions that need to occur, such as cryptocurrency investing, NFT trading, and the actual building of the metaverse itself. So ultimately for now, information will stay where it is, but the metaverse will pull it up when needed. Now, what about search engine optimization; SEO? Will getting an article to the top of Google be the same in the metaverse?
Is SEO about to freaking die? I truly believe that Web 3.0 will eventually make the current form of the internet obsolete. It’s just going to be way more addicting and useful. People will be who they want to be, and go where they want to go. I mean, how do you really compete with that? We’re not exactly sure how SEO will look in Web 3.0. Will Google still be the top search engine, or will a decentralized competitor arise? Either way, who will be in the best position to capitalize on multi-verse SEO? The same people who are already familiar with how SEO works today. SEO in Web 3.0 will come down to who has the most flexibility, adaptability, and straight up entrepreneurship skill.
