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The Importance of the Journey: Search Trails and Destination Pages

Bill Slawski — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:30:50 +0000

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 [...]…

Head URLs and Tail URLs and Bing’s Supplemental Index?

Bill Slawski — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:53:56 +0000

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 [...]…

Google Gets Smarter with Named Entities: Acquires MetaWeb

Bill Slawski — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:06:40 +0000

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 [...]…

Where you Point Your Mouse May Influence Google Search Rankings, Advertisement Placement, and Oneboxes

Bill Slawski — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:51:26 +0000

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 [...]…

Bing’s Categorized Search Results

Bill Slawski — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:02:11 +0000

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 [...]…

Some Random Observations

Bill Slawski — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:52:44 +0000

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 [...]…

How Facebook Might Track Topics Supplied by Advertisers and Display Member Demographics Associated with those Topics

Bill Slawski — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:45:32 +0000

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 [...]…

Google and Location Searches

Bill Slawski — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:22:19 +0000

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 Search Engines May Use Geography and Population Info in Deciding to Show News in Web Searches

Bill Slawski — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:29:10 +0000

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 [...]…

Teaching Computers to Read Newspapers: How a Search Engine Might Use OCR to Index Complex Printed Pages

Bill Slawski — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:45:56 +0000

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 [...]…

How Demand Media May Target Keywords for Profitability

Bill Slawski — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:10:47 +0000

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 [...]…

Google as an Internet Archive?

Bill Slawski — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:22:41 +0000

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 [...]…

Another 10 Ways Search Engines May Rerank Search Results

Bill Slawski — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:15:27 +0000

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 [...]…

How Google Might Suggest Topics for You to Write About

Bill Slawski — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:07:47 +0000

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 [...]…

How a Search Engine Might Rerank Search Results Based upon Time-Based Data in Query Logs

Bill Slawski — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:25:43 +0000

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 [...]…

How a Search Engine Might Identify Possible Query Suggestions

Bill Slawski — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:58:17 +0000

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 [...]…

Google Studies How Search Behavior Changes When Searchers Are Faced with Difficult Questions

Bill Slawski — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:25:58 +0000

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 [...]…

Google Word Completion and Search Query Suggestions from Social Network Connections?

Bill Slawski — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:26:42 +0000

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 [...]…

Google Defines Semantic Closeness as a Ranking Signal

Bill Slawski — Wed, 12 May 2010 20:07:26 +0000

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 [...]…

Google’s Reasonable Surfer: How the Value of a Link May Differ Based upon Link and Document Features and User Data

Bill Slawski — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:18:43 +0000

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 [...]…