Two Microsoft papers being presented at this week’s SIGIR’10 conference in Geneva, Switzerland explore the topics of Search Trails – The pages that a searcher travels through after performing a search for a query before reaching a final destination page.

The idea of delivering searchers to a final destination page, a page where previous [...]…

A search engine might use two sets of indexes – one for query terms that tend to show up in more searches and on more web pages, and another larger index that includes queries that aren’t searched for as much by searchers and don’t appear on many web pages.

By showing results for [...]…

You may know him by a number of names or titles – Governor of California, Terminator, Governator, Conan the Barbarian, Kindergarten Cop, Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia, Arnold Strong, Arnie, The Austrian Oak.

To Metaweb, Arnold Schwarzenegger is referred to as 9202a8c04000641f8000000000006567.

Who is Metaweb?

Metaweb is a company recently acquired by Google, and [...]…

Information about where searchers hover their mouse pointers over different parts of search results, as well as advertisements and Google Onebox results, may be collected by the search engine to be used as ranking signals to determine in part how relevant those items may be seen by Google users in response to a search [...]…

When you search on Bing, sometimes instead of seeing an ordered list of search results, you might see search results broken up into categories. For example, if you search for “Virginia,” your search results start off with an image and link to the state web site, as well as a map. You then see [...]…

People still read books. I started on Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness not long ago. I’m about a fifth of the way through, and I’ve already added “Choice architecture” to my list of concepts to study more, and I’m looking more carefully at the choices I make.

Seeing a lot of [...]…

Is Facebook planning on sharing information about the words that people use on the site in messages, and demographics about the people behind those messages? A couple of patent applications published today at the US Patent and Trademark office describe how the social network might analyze the messages of members, to identify popular topics [...]…

Ever go to a search engine to find out more about a specific place, such as a street or park or business? Want to see what the area around a historic monument is like? These types of searches are often referred to as location searches because the intent behind them is to find information [...]…

How does a search engine choose whether to show news items in web search results and when not to?

If you live in Bealton, Virginia, chances are that you may not be too interested in news of a car crash in Brooklyn, New York, when searching for information about Brooklyn. If you’re from [...]…

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a technology that can enable a computer to look at pictures that include text, and translate those visual representations of text into actual text. If you have words within images on your web pages, there’s a good chance that search engines are ignoring those words, when it comes [...]…

Earlier this month I wrote about a granted Google patent, and a continuation of that patent filed earlier this year, that describe How Google Might Suggest Topics for You to Write About, by providing information to web publishers on queries and topics that are either under-represented in search results or where there’s more demand [...]…

Interested in what people were saying the day after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008? Or how people reacted on the Web to the Chicago Whitesox winning the World Series in 2005? Or the early news on the Gulf oil spill on April 20, 2010?

When you search at Google, you can click [...]…

When a search engine shows you results for a search, the pages shown are likely ordered based upon a mix of relevance and importance, using ranking algorithms from the search engine.

But a search engine doesn’t usually stop there when placing their results in order. They may look at other things to filter and reorder [...]…

If a search engine suggested topics for you to write about because those topics weren’t represented well in their search results, would you? Would a search engine take that step?

A Google patent application published this week explores that topic as well as describing some approaches that they might use to gauge the quality of [...]…

If you search at Yahoo for the phrase “world cup” (without the quotation marks), chances are good that the search engine will show you mostly pages about the 2010 World Cup, even though the tournament is held every 4 years and there may be many pages relevant for the phrase that don’t focus specifically upon [...]…

Like the information architects who organize the content on websites, search engine designers should aspire to provide users with scent at every step of their information-seeking process. Techniques like query suggestions, faceted search and results clustering all offer users the opportunity to make progress on their next step, rather than always having to restart the [...]…

A paper by Google researchers Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan and Zhiwei Guan published last month asks the question How does Search Behavior Change as Search Becomes More Difficult? (pdf)

The paper describes two studies in which participants were given informational tasks to perform – a mix of hard and easy questions – to see if [...]…

When you type a query into a search box at Google or Yahoo or Bing on your desktop computer, chances are a dropdown listing of suggested query terms will appear below the search box.

If you use a smart phone, and start typing into a text box on your phone, your phone may also [...]…

This post may get you thinking about the benefits of using heading elements and lists on web pages for SEO purposes from a slightly different perspective than you may be used to.

Google uses a large number of signals to decide upon the order of pages shown in search results. Some of those signals measure [...]…

Not every link from a page in a link-based ranking system is equal, and a search engine might look at a wide range of factors to determine how might weight each link on a page may pass along.

One of the signals Google uses to rank web pages looks at the links to and from those [...]…

Would search engines be better if they started web crawls from sites like Twitter or Facebook? Wikipedia or Mahalo? DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory?

The Web refreshes at an incredible rate, with new pages added, old pages removed, and words pouring out from blogs, news sites, and other genres of pages. Ecommerce sites showcase new [...]…

If you have a business where you want customers to visit in person, and you haven’t added and/or verified that business in Google Maps, you may want to consider doing so. You can do this regardless of whether you have a web site or not.

The Google Navigator system that Google has developed for mobile [...]…

An interesting new patent filing from Yahoo raises a couple of interesting questions about the future of the company. It describes a wearable computing device that could be used in many ways and the patent application provides a number of examples that sound like something out of a science fiction novel I read a [...]…

Would it surprise you if searches on the Web make up around 10 percent of all pageviews on the Web, and indirectly led to more than 21 percent of the pages viewed online? It surprised a couple of researchers from Yahoo.

That’s the result of a study conducted by Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins from [...]…

The term crowdsourcing was coined by Wired correspondent Jeff Howe, in a 2006 article titled The Rise of Crowdsourcing, where he described how a crowd of people might use their spare time to help in solving problems or creating content, or in addressing other issues that a single person or organization might have difficulties addressing [...]…

Google and Yahoo on Faster Web Pages

Earlier this month, Google announced that they would start considering the speed of a site as one of the ranking signals that they use to rank pages in search results.

Yahoo published a patent filing last year that also described how they might use page load and page rendering times [...]…

The term “undesirable web pages” is used in a patent application from Yahoo published today to refer to pages that rank highly in search results based upon links pointed to those pages solely for the purpose of increasing their rankings for specific queries even though those pages may not be very relevant for the query [...]…

How do you start a blog post? Do you follow a pattern in the way you write your posts, or do you mix up how you present what you write, and how you reach out to your audience?

Here are some approaches that one could use:

a. Using a journalistic inverted pyramid style, where you begin [...]…

A newly granted Google patent on phrase-based indexing calls for a new look at that approach to indexing phrases on the Web, including a process referred to as phrasification.

Say you want to find out who the chief of police is in New York City. You might type the following words into a search box [...]…

There are a number of ways a search engine may decide upon how important a web page might be. That measure of importance might be used by search engines, along with a determination of relevance, as one of the ranking signals used to decide which pages to show first in lists of results shown [...]…