Google is idiosyncratic about what it displays
I was testing the new blog theme installed on Software Memories, specifically to see whether the title and description in the search engine results reflected the metatag title and description I’d just put in, which are
History of the software industry, its companies and its personalities
and
History of the software industry by Curt Monash, who’s been in the middle of it since 1981
respectively.
Well, the answer turns out to be a resounding “Yes and no.” Read more
| Categories: Google, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines | Leave a Comment |
Sneak preview of our blog redesign
Our new blog theme is finally working! You can see it over on Software Memories. We plan to have something very similar soon on our other blogs (but each in its own color). If you want to have any influence on our look and feel — or if you just want to help me out — now would be a really good time to take a look and see if you have any comments.
Salient features of the new design include:
- Bold, clear graphics.
- A strong emphasis on categories as a navigation aid.
- Clear clues about what we would like you to do: read our other blogs and white papers, sign up for our integrated feed, participate in our webcasts … and perhaps even buy our services. 😉
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
How is YouTube relating videos?
One of the great music videos of all time is Madonna’s Material Girl. With two exceptions, all the “related videos” listed by YouTube are just what one would expect: either other Madonna videos, or other versions of Material Girl. One exception is Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, while the other is Marilyn Monroe’s Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend. The connection with the Monroe video is particularly strong, with each being #3 on each other’s “Related” list.
And that’s an outstanding result. Material Girl is obviously a direct reference, conceptually and visually, to Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend. So my question is: How does YouTube know that? Are there favorite videos lists on which they co-exist? Did somebody hand-enter the connection? Is it inferred from their comment threads (which I definitely have not paged through)? Or — by far the least likely but most interesting of all — is there some sort of direct visual comparison?
Other than popularity presumably having something to do with it (both videos are, deservedly, very often watched and commented on), I haven’t figured out which it is.
| Categories: Audio and video search, Google, Search engines | 4 Comments |
Powerset is mildly interesting
Powerset has done a great job of generating buzz for it’s version of smart search. That said, its current demo is mediocre — and that’s being polite. Powerset currently indexes little more than just Wikipedia, and the quality of its search results is about comparable to that of Wikipedia’s justly reviled internal search engine. To determine this, I did searches on both sites on five strings. Wikipedia typically had more total junk ranking higher, but it also put the very best hits of all higher than Powerset did. The strings were:
- Drosophila research
- Bill Clinton foreign policy
- Home run hitters
- Innocents on death row
- Text data mining
| Categories: Powerset, Search engines, Structured search | 4 Comments |
Text Analytics Summit and associated Seth Grimes white paper
Ironically coming right after a Google indexing problem, I am putting up my first sponsored blog post ever. It’s in connection with the forthcoming Text Analytics Summit, at which I will be speaking (in Boston) on June 16. The post itself offers a free white paper by the estimable Seth Grimes.
| Categories: Text Analytics Summit, Text mining | 1 Comment |
Google seems to have rehabilitated us
As previously noted, we were de-indexed by Google, due to the injection of a whole lot of spammy hidden links. We’re back now, after about two weeks, even on the blog (this one) where there was no official de-indexing notice and hence no way to apply for re-consideration. And thus we once again have high rankings for search terms such as Netezza, DATAllegro, Clarabridge, and Attivio.
We’re designing a new blog theme — the current one is just an emergency stopgap — that will (among myriad more important virtues) be more SEO-friendly. I’ll be curious to see whether that makes much actual difference from a search ranking standpoint.
| Categories: Google, Search engine optimization (SEO), Spam and antispam | 1 Comment |