Google is known for its traditional Search, but many of the newer innovations to the Search product are lesser known. There have been advances in image search, visual search and now for the first time, users could access sound search, where anyone could identify a song simply by humming a few bars.

While this feature was designed through advanced machine learning to analyze anyone’s humming, match it up to an archive of music, and provide the top three results with a statistical confidence level, we didn’t want to overcomplicate its use with a lot of engineering jargon.

Our goal was to bring this fun new feature to market in a fun way, to match the simple joy of humming a song, reinforcing the product magic in a lighthearted way.

We discovered that ~50% of song-related queries on Google are people searching for songs they’ve recently heard. We also learned that ~90% of people say they get a song stuck in their head at least 1x/week.

These facts, combined with an upward trend of people searching for "fun virtual thanksgiving activities,” searches spiking +400% in late November, led us to design something fun for people to do at home or virtually with family far away. In a year where there was so little to be joyful about, music and technology had the opportunity to provide some relief.

Since this feature was different from other search features, it didn’t need a lot of product language to explain it, we just needed to show how it worked. The beauty was in its simplicity, something everyone could understand, use and enjoy.

We worked with The Late Late Show to turn Hum to Search into a game. What started as a simple idea of James and the show’s bandleader Reggie Watts taking turns humming, turned into an eight minute segment called The Hum Off. The two stars challenged each other for three rounds, upping the ante with each round from humming with a mouth full of marshmallows to humming while wearing noise cancelling headphones. The segments were posted across the show’s YouTube and social, with paid amplification.

We worked with Billboard Charts to create a branded chart of the “Top Hummed Songs 2020,” ranking the most hummed songs of the year..

We also partnered with Kid Cudi to create social content of himself humming to promote his 12/11 album release along with a YouTube Artist Spotlight Story. We pushed the video out to his 14M followers on social to extend reach.

Hmmm hm hm hm hm hmm hmm! (humming for Kool & the Gang’s Celebration)

We saw more than double our Sound Search traffic from 100M to 200M queries and a 25% increase in hum-related searches.

The late show segment had over 3.3 million digital views in just five days, and 5.5 million digital views overall for both segments, with an average watch time of five full minutes. When The Hum Off segments aired, we saw a 10x lift in search interest for our first integration and 4x lift in search on the second.

YouTube comments validated our hunch that viewers would quickly adopt the game.