Jun 27 2024
WordPress Plugins Compromised At The Source via @sejournal, @martinibuster

WordPress.org and Wordfence have published warnings about hackers adding malicious code to plugins at the source, leading to widespread infections via updates.

Five Compromised Plugins… To Date

Typically what happens is that a plugin contains a weakness (a vulnerability) that allows an attacker to compromise individual sites that use that version of a plugin. But these compromises are different because the plugins themselves don’t contain a vulnerability. The attackers are directly injecting malicious code at directly at the source of the plugin, forcing an update which then spreads to all sites that use the plugin.

Wordfence first noticed one plugin that contained malicious code. When they uploaded the details to their database they then discovered four other plugins that were compromised with a similar kind of malicious code. Wordfence immediately notified WordPress about their findings.

Wordfence shared details of the affected plugins:

“Social Warfare 4.4.6.4 – 4.4.7.1
Patched Version: 4.4.7.3

Blaze Widget 2.2.5 – 2.5.2
Patched Version: None

Wrapper Link Element 1.0.2 – 1.0.3
Patched Version: It appears that someone removed the malicious code, however, the latest version is tagged as 1.0.0 which is lower than the infected versions. This means it may be difficult to update to the latest version, so we recommend removing the plugin until a properly tagged version is released.

Contact Form 7 Multi-Step Addon 1.0.4 – 1.0.5
Patched Version: None

Simply Show Hooks 1.2.1
Patched Version None”

WordPress shut down all five plugins directly at the official plugin repository and published a notification at each of the plugin pages that they are closed and unavailable.

Screenshot Of A Delisted WordPress Plugin

The infected plugins generate rogue admin accounts that phones home to a server. The attacked websites are altered with SEO spam links that are added to the footer. Sophisticated malware can be hard to catch because the hackers actively try to hide their code so that, for example, the code looks like a string of numbers, the malicious code is obfuscated. Wordfence noted that this specific malware was not sophisticated and was easy to identify and track.

Wordfence made an observation about this curious quality of the malware:

“The injected malicious code is not very sophisticated or heavily obfuscated and contains comments throughout making it easy to follow. The earliest injection appears to date back to June 21st, 2024, and the threat actor was still actively making updates to plugins as recently as 5 hours ago.”

WordPress Issues Advisory On Compromised Plugins

The WordPress advisory states that attackers are identifying plugin developers that have “committer access” (meaning that they can commit code to the plugin) and then in the next step they used credentials from other data breaches that match with those developers. The hackers use those credentials to directly access the plugin at the code level and inject their malicious code.

WordPress explained:

“On June 23 and 24, 2024, five WordPress.org user accounts were compromised by an attacker trying username and password combinations that had been previously compromised in data breaches on other websites. The attacker used access to these 5 accounts to issue malicious updates to 5 plugins those users had committer access to.

…The affected plugins have had security updates issued by the Plugins Team to protect user security.”

The fault of these compromises apparently lies with the plugin developer security practices. WordPress’ official announcement reminded plugin developers of best practices to use in order to prevent these kinds of compromises from happening.

How To Know If Your Site Is Compromised?

At this point in time there are only five plugins known to be compromised with this specific malicious code. Wordfence said that the hackers create admins with the user names of “Options” or “PluginAuth” so one way to double check if a site is compromised might be to look for any new admin accounts, especially ones with those user names.

Wordfence recommended that affected sites that use any of the five plugins to delete rogue administrator level user accounts and to run a malware scan with the Wordfence plugin and remove the malicious code.

Someone in the comments asked if they should be worried even if they don’t use any of the five plugins”

“Do you think we need to be worried about other plug-in updates? Or was this limited to these 5 plug-ins.”

Chloe Chamberland, the Threat Intelligence Lead at Wordfence responded:

“Hi Elizabeth, at this point it appears to be isolated to just those 5 plugins so I wouldn’t worry too much about other plugin updates. However, out of extra caution, I would recommend reviewing the change-sets of any plugin updates prior to updating them on any sites you run to make sure no malicious code is present.”

Two other commenters noted that they had at least one of the rogue admin accounts on sites that didn’t use any of the five known affected plugins. At this time it’s not known if any other plugins are affected.

Read Wordfence’s advisory and explanation of what is going on:

Supply Chain Attack on WordPress.org Plugins Leads to 5 Maliciously Compromised WordPress Plugins

Read the official WordPress.org announcement:

Keeping Your Plugin Committer Accounts Secure

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Algonga

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Jun 26 2024
Google: “Our Ranking Systems Aren’t Perfect” via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s SearchLiaison responded to a plea on X (formerly Twitter) about ridiculously poor search results in which he acknowledged that Google’s reviews algorithm could be doing a better job and outlined what’s being done to stop rewarding sites that shouldn’t be ranking in the first place.

Questioning Google’s Search Results

The exchange with Google began with a post about a high ranking sites that was alleged to fall short of Google’s guidelines.

@dannyashton tweeted:

“This review has been ranking #1 on Google for “Molekule Air Mini+ review” for the past six months.

It is 50% anecdotal and 50% marketing messaging. It doesn’t share in-depth original research.

So, how did they make it to the top of Google?”

Followed by:

“Instead of a third-party review (which is likely what searchers are looking for), Google ranks an article backed by the brand:

Searchers land in an advertorial built off marketing materials:

So little care that they even left briefing notes in the published version 😞

And I think I found the reason why it ranks #1… Money.”

The general responses to the tweets were sympathetic, such as this one:

“WILD.

And this is on page 1…

Is this what writing for readers is? Is this what people need/want?

I think of folks like my mom here who wouldn’t know better and to dig more.

It looks and seems nice, must be trustworthy.

I mean, that’s their goals, right? Dupe and dip.”

Google’s Algorithms Aren’t Perfect

SearchLiaison responded to those tweets to explain that he personally goes through the feedback submitted to Google and discusses them with the search team. He also shared about the monumental scale of ranking websites, saying that Google is indexing trillions of web pages, and because of that the ranking process is itself scaled and automated.

SearchLiaison tweeted:

“Danny, I appreciate where you’re coming from — just as I appreciated the post that HouseFresh originally shared, as well as this type of feedback from others. I do. I also totally agree that the goal is for us to reward content that’s aligned with our guidance. From the HouseFresh post itself, there seemed to be some sense that we had actually improved over time:

“In our experience, each rollout of the Products Review Update has shaken things up, generally benefitting sites and writers who actually dedicated time, effort, and money to test products before they would recommend them to the world.”

That said, there’s clearly more we should be doing. I don’t think this is particularly new, as I’ve shared before that our ranking systems aren’t perfect and that I see content that we ought to do better by, as well as content we’re rewarding when we shouldn’t.

But it’s also not a system where any individual reviews content and says “OK, that’s great — rank it better” or “OK that’s not great, downrank it.” It simply wouldn’t work for a search engine that indexes trillions of pages of content from across the web to operate that way. You need scalable systems. And you need to keep working on improving those systems.

That’s what we’ll keep doing. We’re definitely aware of these concerns. We’ve seen the feedback, including the feedback from our recent form. I’ve personally been through every bit of that feedback and have been organizing it so our teams can look further at different aspects. This is in addition to the work they’re already doing, based on feedback we’ve already seen.”

Some of the takeaways from SearchLiaison’s statement is that:

1. Google agrees that their algorithms should reward content that is aligned with their guidance (presumably guidance about good reviews, helpfulness, and spam).

2. He acknowledged that the current ranking systems can still use improvement in rewarding the useful content and not rewarding inappropriate content.

3. Google’s systems are scaled.

4. Google is committed to listening to feedback and working toward improving their algorithms.

5. SearchLiaison confirmed that they are reviewing the feedback and organizing it for further analysis to identify what needs attention for improvement to rankings.

What Is Taking So Long To Fix Google?

Someone else questioned Google’s process for rolling out updates that subsequently shakes things up. It’s a good question because it makes sense to test an update to rankings to make sure that the changes improve the quality of sites being ranked and not do the opposite.

@mikefutia tweeted:

“Danny, aren’t all your ‘system improvements’ fully tested BEFORE rolling them out?

Surely your team was aware of the shakeup in the SERPs that these last few updates would cause.

Completely legitimate hobby sites written by passionate creators getting absolutely DECIMATED by these updates.

All in favor of Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Forbes, Business Insider, and other nonsense gaining at their expense.

I guess what I’m saying is — surely this was not a surprise.

You guys knew this carnage was coming as a direct result of the updates.

And now — here we are, NINE months later — and there have been ZERO cases of these legitimate sites recovering. In fact, the March update just made it 100x worse.

And so Google is saying ‘yeah we f-d up, we’re working on it.’

But the question is—and I think I speak on behalf of thousands of creators when I ask—’What the hell is taking so long?’”

We know that Google’s third party quality raters review search results before an update is rolled out. But clearly there are many creators, site owners and search marketers who feel that Google’s search results are going the wrong way with every update.

SearchLiaison’s response is a good one because it acknowledges that Google is not perfect and that they are actively trying to improve the search results. But that does nothing to help the thousands of site owners who are disappointed in the direction that Google’s algorithm is headed.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ivan_kislitsin

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Jun 26 2024
Google Announces New GA4 Features As Universal Analytics Sunset Nears via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

As the July 1, 2024 shutdown date for Universal Analytics (UA) draws near, Google has announced new features and improvements for Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

These enhancements give marketers deeper insights and tools for cross-channel measurement and budget optimization.

Expanded Cross-Channel Reporting

GA4 is getting improved cross-channel reporting capabilities.

You will soon be able to integrate data from third-party advertising partners such as Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap directly into GA4 properties.

This will allow for a more complete view of campaign performance across platforms.

Additionally, GA4 will introduce aggregated impressions from linked Campaign Manager 360 accounts in the advertising workspace.

This feature will give advertisers a thorough overview of campaign performance across the entire marketing funnel.

AI-Powered Insights

Google is leveraging its AI capabilities to provide users with generated insights.

These AI-driven summaries will explain data trends and fluctuations using plain language, enabling businesses to make faster, more informed decisions based on their analytics data.

Advanced Planning & Budgeting Tools

Later this year, GA4 will introduce cross-channel budgeting features, including a projections report.

This tool will allow advertisers to track media pacing and projected performance against target objectives across multiple channels.

This addition should improve marketers’ ability to optimize media spend and allocate budgets more effectively.

Privacy-First Approach

GA4 continues to prioritize user privacy while delivering effective measurement solutions.

Upcoming features include support for Chrome Privacy Sandbox APIs and improvements to enhanced conversions.

Google says these updates will offer complete picture of cross-channel conversion attribution in a privacy-safe manner.

Preparing For The Future

Steve Ganem, Director of Product Management for Google Analytics, highlights the platform’s commitment to adaptability:

“Google Analytics 4 is truly built to be durable for the future. We’ll continue to invest in giving you a tool that helps answer fundamental questions about your business across your consumer’s entire path to purchase, despite ongoing changes in the measurement landscape.”

As the sunset date for Universal Analytics approaches, Google encourages users who haven’t yet made the switch to complete their migration to GA4.

The company also reminds UA users to download any historical data they wish to retain before the July 1 shutdown date.

Featured Image: Muhammad Alimaki/Shutterstock

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Jun 25 2024
Google Ends Continuous Scroll SERPS: What It Really Means via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google announced that they are ending continuous scrolling in the search results (SERPs) as a way to speed up the serving of search results. Many in the search marketing community question that reason and raise questions about it. What’s really going on here?

Continuous Scroll In Search Results

Infinite scroll is a way of showing content that was popularized by social media in which users can aimlessly navigate in a state of constant discovery. It’s purposeless navigation.

In 2021 Google adopted Continuous Scrolling in the mobile search results, which showed up to four pages worth of web results before requiring users to click a link to see more. This change was  welcomed by site owners and the search marketing community because it created the possibility of exposing more sites to searchers.

No More Continuous Scroll

The Verge recently published a report that Google has decided to remove continuous search in order to be able to serve faster search results. The change happens first to desktop search results to be followed later by a change to the mobile search results.

The Verge reported:

“In its place on desktop will be Google’s classic pagination bar, allowing users to jump to a specific page of search results or simply click “Next” to see the next page. On mobile, a “More results” button will be shown at the bottom of a search to load the next page.”

What’s The Real Impact?

While Google claims that the change is to help Google serve faster search results, many in the search marketing community are skeptical about the impact and with good reason. The U.S. Department of Justice released emails showing Google’s top management colluding about ways to show more advertising in the search results.

Brett Tabke, founder of Pubcon search marketing conference (and the person who invented the acronym SERPs), offered his opinion about the change to continuous scroll:

“It effectively boxes more clicks on to page one. That will result in a higher percentage of clicks going to Ads and Google properties. I think it is more evidence that Google is on a path to a new version of portal and away from search. Organic search itself will move to page 2, and I believe eventually to a new domain.

They will move away from organic results on page one. So what is left?

1) Google Ads

2) Google property links

3) Google Overviews vomit and

4) a link to page two.

They are on a path to fulfilling all general “searches” with their own responses in some form or another. When they don’t have a perfect response, maybe they will do “people also ask” and those lead back to a SERP where they can fulfill the search with their own properties and responses.”

Brett is not alone in his skepticism.

In what can be seen as a general sign of disbelief of Google’s motivations, many people have posted their skeptical opinions on X (formerly Twitter).

One person tweeted:

“I wouldn’t be shocked if it was hurting bottom-of-the-page / top of page 2+ ad clicks”

Another tweet reflected the common perception that Google shows less and less links to independent websites:

“Why not just show one page with Google AI, Reddit and the usual culprits? Who clicks on page 2 anyway?”

Lastly, a tweet from an anonymous account nicknamed “Google Honesty” offered a harsh view of Google’s motivations.

They tweeted:

“Continuous scroll allows everyone to be on page one.

We prefer to crush your spirit.

It’s far more humiliating to be on page 6.

Pagination in search allows this ✅”

Good For Goose. Not For Gander?

While there are many voices who see dark reasons for Google’s decision to end continuous scrolling in the SERPs, there are some who see it differently.

Kevin Indig tweeted about an uncomfortable truth about continuous scrolling which is that they are not universally a good feature.

Kevin tweeted:

“Paginated SERPs are back!

I’ve found continuous scroll to be a subpar solution for websites as well.”

Continuous scrolling is a useful feature for social media but when it comes to other kinds of websites, it’s the answer to a question that nobody is asking. Infinite scrolling is generally a poor user experience outside of the context of social media.

What’s kind of hard to ignore is that (arguably) most site owners and search marketers agree that it’s a poor user experience, inappropriate for many contexts or in some cases problematic for SEO.

So in a way, one should step back and at least consider the possibility that infinite scroll is great within the context of social media where aimless browsing and interaction makes sense but maybe infinite scrolling makes less sense within the context of purposeful browsing like in an ecommerce site, an informational site, or even in a search result. Purposeful browsing demands purposeful navigation, not aimless navigation.

Seen in that light, perhaps it might have been more believable had Google insisted that continuous scrolling was a poor user experience that didn’t fit the context of search results. Google’s  chosen explanation is not going over very well.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ljupco Smokovski

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Jun 25 2024
Google Debunks SEO Myth: Branded Keywords Won’t Hurt Rankings via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

In a recent exchange, Google’s Search Liaison addressed concerns about using branded keywords in articles.

The discussion, which unfolded over several tweets, centered on the impact of mentioning specific brand names in product reviews and other content.

Jake Boly, a content creator, initially asked why his articles featuring unique content consistently ranked on pages 3-4 of search results, speculating that it might be due to the presence of branded terms.

This sparked a debate about SEO best practices and Google’s ranking algorithms.

Conflicting Advice from SEO Experts

Taleb Kabbara, an SEO professional, suggested mentioning branded keywords could harm rankings, advising against using terms like “new balance” in review titles.

He claimed to have audited numerous sites and observed negative ranking impacts due to such keywords.

Google’s Official Response

Google’s Search Liaison refuted these claims.

In a detailed response, they stated:

“No, you shouldn’t be afraid to mention the brand name of something you are reviewing. It’s literally what readers would expect you to do, and our systems are trying to reward things that are helpful to readers.”

The Google representative explained that writing a review without mentioning the product being reviewed would be counterintuitive.

They emphasized that Google’s systems aim to find and rank content that’s genuinely useful to readers, regardless of using branded terms.

Evidence Supporting Google’s Stance

To further support their point, the Liaison provided evidence from a specific search query for “new balance minimus tr v2 review.”

They highlighted that the top result for this query was not from a big brand but from an individual reviewer, demonstrating that Google can rank independent content when it’s relevant and helpful.

Reaffirming Best Practices

The conversation took an additional turn when Mike Hardaker shared advice he had received about no longer ranking for branded keywords. Google’s Search Liaison responded succinctly, “Yeah, don’t do that,” reaffirming their stance against avoiding branded terms in content.

Why SEJ Cares

This exchange clarifies a misconception with direct communication from Google on its approach to ranking content containing branded keywords.

It reminds publishers to write the best content for readers rather than attempt to game the system by avoiding specific terms.

Featured Image: Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock

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Jun 25 2024
GA4 Update Brings Alignment With Google Ads Targeting via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google announced an update to the advertising section within Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

The enhancement aims to clarify and align user counts eligible for remarketing and ad personalization.

Under the change, advertisers can now quickly view the size of their “Advertising Segments” within GA4’s interface.

These segments represent the pool of users whose data can be leveraged for remarketing campaigns and personalized ad targeting through products like Google Ads.

Improved Synchronization For Unified Insights

Previously, there could be discrepancies between the user counts shown as eligible for advertising use cases in GA4 and the Google Ads Audience Manager.

With this update, Google says the numbers will be fully aligned, allowing marketers to confidently make data-driven advertising decisions.

Expanding Advertising Segment Visibility

Along with the alignment fix, the update expands visibility into advertising segment sizes within the GA4 interface.

A new “Advertising segments” panel under the “Advertising” section reports the number of users GA4 collects and sends to ad products for personalization.

An “advertising segment” is a list of GA4 users synchronized with Google advertising products for remarketing and personalized ad targeting purposes.

Segment sizes can vary based on targeting requirements for different ad networks.

Why SEJ Cares

This update from Google addresses a key pain point for advertisers utilizing GA4 and Google Ads.

Full alignment between advertising audience sizes across products eliminates confusion and enables more data-driven strategies.

The added transparency into advertising segment sizes directly in GA4 is also a welcomed upgrade.

How This Can Help You

With aligned user counts, advertisers can plan and forecast remarketing campaigns with greater precision using GA4 data.

This unified view means you can make media investment decisions based on accurate reach projections.

Additionally, the new advertising segments panel provides extra context about the scope of your audiences for ad personalization.

This visibility allows for more informed strategies tailored to your specific segment sizes.

Featured Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock

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Jun 25 2024
New Features Improve Anthropic’s Claude Collaborative Workflow via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Anthropic announced new features that will significantly enhance Claude’s functionality to make it more collaborative, easier to use and speed up workflows. The new functionalities enable teams to ground Claude with the documentation needed to complete tasks, brainstorm, and be able to get things done faster with AI.

Three Major Steps Forward

The improvements that Anthropic is introducing cover three areas:

1. Projects:
A place to organize chats and knowledge.

2. Sharing:
Better collaboration with teams

3. Artifacts:
This has already rolled out, it’s a collaborative workspace for creating and editing content, coding, and designing with Claude in real-time.

1. Projects

Anthropic’s Projects is a collaborative space where team members can share curated chats and knowledge together in order to enable better decisions and brainstorming. All Claude.AI Pro and Team subscribers will have access to Projects.

Each project has a 200K context window for documents, code and other data that can be used to improve output.

According to Anthropic:

“Projects allow you to ground Claude’s outputs in your internal knowledge—be it style guides, codebases, interview transcripts, or past work. This added context enables Claude to provide expert assistance across tasks, from writing emails like your marketing team to writing SQL queries like a data analyst. With Projects, you can get started much faster and extend your skills further for any task.”

With Projects, a team can upload documents that provide the knowledge necessary for completing tasks, such as legal documentation, course material, historical financial reports and economic indicators, virtually any documentation that Claude can use for analysis or content creation.

2. Sharing

This is a way for team members to share relevant and important chats with each other through a shared activity feed. Anthropic envisions Sharing as especially useful for creative projects, research, and product development. For example, it’s a way to share brain-storming sessions and for web designers and other stakeholders to share ideas and work together with Claude to complete projects.

3. Artifacts

Artifacts is a way to create together with Claude, with a user interface that shows the chat on one side and the output on the other.

Anthropic shares five examples of how Artifacts can be used:

“1. Software Development: Programmers can use Artifacts to collaboratively write and debug code. Claude can help generate code snippets and provide real-time explanations.

2. Graphic Design: Designers can work with Claude to create and refine SVG graphics for logos or illustrations, iterating on designs in real-time.

3. Marketing: Content creators can use Artifacts to draft and edit marketing copy. Claude can suggest improvements and generate alternative versions side-by-side.

4. Data Analysis: Data scientists can collaborate with Claude to write and optimize SQL queries, visualizing data in charts and trendlines, and refining analyses together.

5. UX/UI Design: Designers can work with Claude to prototype website layouts using HTML and CSS, previewing changes instantly in the Artifacts window.”

This is Just The Beginning

Anthropic shared that they will be rolling out additional features such as integrations with popular third-party apps, further extending Claude for AI-assisted collaboration.

Read more from Anthropic’s announcement.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Photo For Everything

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Jun 25 2024
Google Updates Guidance On EEA Carousels Beta Structured Data via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google updated the structured data guidance on a beta carousels structured data that is intended for users in the European Economic Area, which is related to Google’s preparations for the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The new guidance covers how to use this structured data on summary or category pages and for paginated categories.

Carousel (Beta) Rich Results For Aggregators & Suppliers

The Carousel (Beta) rich results is intended for sites about travel, local, and for shopping queries shown to users in the EEA. Google search users can scroll horizontally across tiles that contain information specific to the context of the search. Sites that use this new structured data become eligible to be featured in the new carousel rich results.

The original announcement from February 2024 explained that display for shopping queries will at first be limited to Czechia, France, Germany and the UK.

Updated Documentation

The new documentation consists of a new three sentence paragraph that is added to the current Structured data carousels (beta) documentation.

This is the new guidance that was added to the documentation:

“Mark up all items that are on the summary or category page. For paginated categories, add an ItemList to each subsequent page and include the entities that are listed on that page. For infinite scroll, focus on marking up the entities that are initially loaded in the viewport.”

The changelog has a notation that explains the reason for the update:

“Marking up categories with many items for structured data carousels (beta)

What: Added guidance on how to mark up categories with many items to the structured data carousels (beta).

Why: We received a question through our feedback button about how to implement this markup for categories with many items, such as paginated content or infinite scroll.”

Read the updated documentation:

Structured data carousels (beta) – Guidelines

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Jun 24 2024
OpenAI’s Rockset Acquisition And How It May Impact Digital Marketing via @sejournal, @martinibuster

OpenAI acquired a technology from Rockset that will enable the creation of new products, real-time data analysis, and recommendation systems, possibly signaling a new phase for OpenAI that could change the face of search marketing in the near future.

What Is Rockset And Why It’s Important

Rockset describes its technology as a Hybrid Search, a type of multi-faceted approach to search (integrating vector search, text search and metadata filtering) to retrieve documents that can augment the generation process in RAG systems. RAG is a technique that combines search with generative AI that is intended to create more factually accurate and contextually relevant results. It’s a technology that plays a role in BING’s AI search and Google’s AI Overviews.

Rockset’s research paper about the Rockset Hybrid Search Architecture notes:

“All vector search is becoming hybrid search as it drives the most relevant, real-time application experiences. Hybrid search involves incorporating vector search and text
search as well as metadata filtering, all in a single query. Hybrid search is used in search, recommendations and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.

…Rockset is designed and optimized to ingest data in real time, index different data types and run retrieval and ranking algorithms.”

What makes Rockset’s hybrid search important is that it allows the indexing and use of multiple data types (vectors, text, geospatial data about objects & events), including real-time data use. That powerful flexibility allows the technology to interact with different kinds of data that can be used for in-house and consumer-facing applications related to contextually relevant product recommendations, customer segmentation and analysis for targeted marketing campaigns, personalization, personalized content aggregation, location-based recommendations (restaurants, services, etc.) and in applications that increase user engagement (Rockset lists numerous case studies of how their technology is used).

OpenAI’s announcement explained:

“AI has the opportunity to transform how people and organizations leverage their own data. That’s why we’ve acquired Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database that provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities.

Rockset enables users, developers, and enterprises to better leverage their own data and access real-time information as they use AI products and build more intelligent applications.

…Rockset’s infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence. We’re excited to bring these benefits to our customers…”

OpenAI’s announcement also explains that they intend to integrate Rockset’s technology into their own retrieval infrastructure.

At this point we know the transformative quality of hybrid search and the possibilities but OpenAI is at this point only offering general ideas of how this will translate into APIs and products that companies and individuals can create and use.

The official announcement of the acquisition from Rockset, penned by one of the cofounders, offered these clues:

“We are thrilled to join the OpenAI team and bring our technology and expertise to building safe and beneficial AGI.

…Advanced retrieval infrastructure like Rockset will make AI apps more powerful and useful. With this acquisition, what we’ve developed over the years will help make AI accessible to all in a safe and beneficial way.

Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure backing OpenAI’s product suite. We’ll be helping OpenAI solve the hard database problems that AI apps face at massive scale.”

What Exactly Does The Acquisition Mean?

Duane Forrester, formerly of Bing Search and Yext (LinkedIn profile), shared his thoughts:

“Sam Altman has stated openly a couple times that they’re not chasing Google. I get the impression he’s not really keen on being seen as a search engine. More like they want to redefine the meaning of the phrase “search engine”. Reinvent the category and outpace Google that way. And Rockset could be a useful piece in that approach.

Add in Apple is about to make “ChatGPT” a mainstream thing with consumers when they launch the updated Siri this Fall, and we could very easily see query starts migrate away from traditional search engine boxes. Started with TikTok/social, now moving to ai-assistants.”

Another approach, which could impact SEO, is that OpenAI could create a product based on an API that can be used by companies to power in-house and consumer facing applications. With that approach, OpenAI provides the infrastructure (like they currently do with ChatGPT and foundation models) and let the world innovate all over the place with OpenAI at the center (as it currently does) as the infrastructure.

I asked Duane about that scenario and he agreed but also remained open to an even wider range of possibilities:

“Absolutely, a definite possibility. As I’ve been approaching this topic, I’ve had to go up a level. Or conceptually switch my thinking. Search is, at its heart, information retrieval. So if I go down the IR path, how could one reinvent  “search” with today’s systems and structures that redefine how information retrieval happens?

This is also – it should be noted- a description for the next-gen advanced site search.  They could literally take over site search across a wide range of mid-to-enterprise level companies. It’s easily as advanced as the currently most advanced site-search systems. Likely more advanced if they launch it. So ultimately, this could herald a change to consumer search (IR) and site-search-based systems.

Expanding from that, apps, as they allude to.  So I can see their direction here.”

Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures (Poshmark, Roku, Uber) speculated on Twitter about how this acquisition may transform OpenAI:

“This is speculation but I imagine Rockset will power all their enterprise search offerings to compete with Glean and / or a consumer search offering to compete with Perplexity / Google. Permissioning capabilities of Rockset make me think more the former than latter”

Others on Twitter offered their take on how this will affect the future of AI:

“I doubt OpenAI will jump into the enterprise search fray. It’s just far too challenging and something that Microsoft and Google are best positioned to go after.

This is a play to accelerate agentic behaviors and make deep experts within the enterprise. You might argue it’s the same thing an enterprise search but taking an agent first approach is much more inline with the OpenAI mission.”

A Consequential Development For OpenAI And Beyond

The acquisition of Rockset may prove to be the foundation of one of the most consequential changes to how businesses use and deploy AI, which in turn, like many other technological developments, could also have an effect on the business of digital marketing.

Read how Rockset customers power recommendation systems, real-time personalization, real-time analytics, and other applications:

Featured Case Studies

Read the official Rockset announcement:

OpenAI Acquires Rockset

Read the official OpenAI announcement:

OpenAI acquires Rockset
Enhancing our retrieval infrastructure to make AI more helpful

Read the original Rockset research paper:

Rockset Hybrid Search Architecture (PDF)

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