Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished
looking back at what we’ve learned and what we can do better.

Search Central Live Jakarta 2024

On July 25, 2024, we were delighted to host 335 people in Jakarta for talks from Googlers and, for
the first time in Indonesia, community lightning talks! The Google talks focused more on the
foundation of Search with topics such as how Search works (the longer version), a talk about
quality and updates, AI and Search, Search features, analyzing traffic drops with Search Console,
and tips for ecommerce and large sites.

The community talks were more varied and covered a wide range of topics:

Overall, people were very happy with the event. They loved the lightning talks and the Google
presentations, however also had some suggestions for future events; highlighting three:

1. More lightning talks: People want to hear more from their peers. From our
   perspective this is doable, since we’ve received way more pitches for lightning talks than we
   expected. However, at the same time, people also want more Googler’s talks.
2. More technical talks: Going more technical is not a problem for us and
   something we’ll consider for upcoming talks, however we need to ensure that everyone can enjoy
   these talks, and that it can be actionable and relevant. If we let Cherry talk about the deeply
   technical details of Google News, Gary might fall asleep.
3. Varied location: Indonesia is unbelievably and wonderfully large, and thus
   people have to travel long distances to get to a location. One suggestion was that we could
   organize events in Indonesia in multiple locations, or at least vary the location instead of
   just hosting the event in Jakarta every year. We heard you loud and clear and we’re going to
   look into the feasibility of these suggestions.

We hope to see you again next time we’re in Indonesia!

Search Central Live Bangkok 2024

We packed 310 people in the ballroom on August 9, 2024, for the first Search Central Live in
Thailand (previously in 2019, we hosted a
Webmaster Conference event in Bangkok).

Like in Jakarta, we had talks from Googlers about various foundational topics such as how Search
works (the longer version), a talk about quality and updates, AI and Search, and managing
multilingual sites, and we also had a very hands-on talk from our very own
Daniel Waisberg
about Google Trends for SEO, and making data available and useful at scale.

Our
Search Central Help Community
Product Expert,
Weerayut Chalaruk,
gave a talk about analyzing traffic drops with Search Console. The talk was well received with
lots of positive mentions in the post-event survey.

So what did we learn in Thailand? Well:

1. More everything! More time, more events, more frequency, more topics, and more
   speakers! Hard to argue with that.
2. More Q&A: People LOVE Q&As, and this feedback came up in both Jakarta and
   Bangkok. We’ll see how this might be feasible at future events, bearing in mind that we run on a
   rather tight schedule. We’re also exploring ways to collate and prioritize live questions with
   the hope to make the Q&A better for everyone.
3. A recommended reading list or things people should know pre-event: This is an
   interesting idea we hadn’t considered in the past. While it’s more common to have reading
   recommendations for workshops, we can see how that might be helpful for other events as well. If
   you promise to make time to read items on the list, we promise to explore this option. Pinky
   swear!

Next, we’re going to Malaysia and Taiwan for our last two SCL events in Asia this year, and we are
so excited! If you speak Mandarin, there’s still time left to apply for the
Search Central Live Taipei 2024
event.

It’s been super nice to meet all of you in Jakarta and Bangkok, thank you for coming to spend a
wonderful day with us! We hope you had a good time and we hope to see everyone again soon!

Posted by Cherry Prommawin and
Gary Illyes