Semantic SEO: Solution or Runway for Google Ads, Formerly AdWords?
May 14, 2020
I participated in a conversation with Robert David Steele, a former CIA professional, and a former Google software engineer named Zack Vorhies. One of the topics touched upon was Google’s relaxing of its relevance thresholds. A video of extracts from the conversation contains some interesting information; for example, the location of a repository of Google company documents Mr. Vorhies publicly released.
My contribution to the discussion focused on how valuable “relaxed” relevance is. The approach allows Google to display more ads per query. The “relaxed” query means that an ad inventory can be worked through more quickly than it would be IF old fashioned Boolean search were the norm for users. Advertisers’ eyes cross when an explanation of Boolean and “relaxing” a semantic method have to be explained.
DarkCyber’s research team prefers Boolean. None of the researchers need training wheels, Mother Google (which seems to emulate Elsa Krebs of James Bond fame) and WFH Googlers bonding with their mobile phones like a fuzzier, semantic Tommy Bahama methods.
The team spotted “The Newbie’s Information to Semantic Search: Examples and Instruments.” Our interpretation of “newbies” is that the collective noun refers to desperate marketers who have to find a way to boost traffic to a Web site BEFORE going to his or her millennial leader and saying, “Um, err, you know, I think we have to start buying Google Ads.”
Yes, there is a link between the SEO rah rah and the Google online advertising system. The idea is simple. When SEO fails, the owner of the Web page has to buy Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). In a future post, someone on the team will write about this interesting business process. Just not in this post, thank you.
The article triggering this essay includes what looks like simplified semi-technical diagrams. Plus, there are screenshots featuring Yo Yo Ma. And SEOish jargon; for example:
Coding
Elements
Knowledge as in “knowledge of any Web page.” DarkCyber finds categorical affirmatives a crime against logicians living and semantically dead.
Mapping as in “semantic mapping”
Markup
Semantic
Plus, the write up some to be an advertorial weaponized content object for a product called Optimizer. DarkCyber concluded that the system is a word look up tool, sort of a dumbed down thesaurus for hustlers, unemployed business administration junior college drop outs, and earnest art history majors working in the honorable discipline of SEO.
What’s the semantic analysis convey to a reader unfamiliar with the concepts of “semantic,” “mark up,” and “knowledge.”? The answer, in the view of the DarkCyber team, is less and less useful search results. Mr. Vorhies makes this point in the video cited above. In fact, he wants to go back to the “old Google.” Why? Today’s Google outputs frustratingly off point results.
The article’s main points, based on the DarkCyber interpretation of the article, are:
First, statements like this: “…don’t actually recognize how troublesome it’s to elucidate what’s being communicated with out the assistance of all “beyond-words” indicators.” Yeah, what? DarkCyber thinks the tortured words imply that smart software and data can light up the dark spaces of a user’s query. Stated another way: Search results should answer the user’s question with on point results. Yes, that sounds good. A tiny percentage of people using Google want to conduct an internal reference interview to identify what’s needed, select the online indexes to search, formulate the terms required for a query, and then run the query on multiple systems. Very few users of online search systems wants to scan results, analyzed the most useful content, dedupe and verify data, and then capture facts with appropriate bibliographic information. Many times, this type of process is little for than input for a more refined query. Who has time for a systematic, thorough informationizing process. Why? Saying the word “pizza” to a mobile phone is the way to go. If it works for pizza, the simple query will work for Inconel 235 chemical properties, right? This easy approach is called semantic. In reality it is a canned search with results shaped by advertisers who want clicks.
Second, a person desperately seeking traffic to a Web site must index content on a Web page. Today, “index” is a not-so-useful term. Today one “tags” a page with user assigned terms. Controlled vocabularies play almost no role in modern Web search systems. Just make up a term, then to a TikTok video and become a millionaire. Easy, right? To make tags more useful, one must use synonyms. If a page is about pizza, then a semantic tag is one that might offer the tag “vegetarian.” At least one of the DarkCyber team is old enough to remember being taught how to use a thesaurus and a dictionary. Today, one needs smart software to help the art major navigate the many words available in the English language.
Third, to make the best use of related words, the desperate marketer must embrace “semantic mapping.” The idea is to “visualize relationships between ideas and entities.” (The term “entity” is not defined, which the DarkCyber team is perfectly okay for newbies who need help with indexing.) The idea of a semantic map is a Google generated search page — actually a report of allegedly related data — created by Google’s smart software. In grade school decades ago, students were taken to the library, taught about the “catalog”. Then students would gather information from “sources.” The discovered information was then winnowed and assembled into an essay or a report. If something looked or seemed funny, there was a reference librarian or a teacher to inform the student about the method for verifying facts. Now? Just trust Google. To make the idea vivid, the article provides another Google output. Instead of Yo Yo Ma, the topic is “pizza.” There you go.
The write up reminds the reader to use the third party application Text Optimizer for best results. And the bad news is that “semantic codes” must be attached to these semantically related index terms. One example is the command for deleted text. Indeed, helpful. Another tag is to indicate a direct quotation. No link to a source is suggested. Another useful method for the practicing hustler.
Let’s step back.
The article is all too typical of search engine optimization expertise. The intent is wrapped in the wool of jargon. The main point is to sell a third party software which provides training wheels to the thrashing SEO hungry individual. Plus, the content is not designed to help the user who needs specific information.
The focus of SEO is to add fluff to content. When the SEO words don’t do the job, what does the SEO marketer do?
Buy Google Ads. This is “pay to play”, and it is the one thing that Google relies upon for revenue.
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2020
New Warning System For False Information
April 24, 2020
False information, fake news, and disinformation have been popular words in the American vocabulary since Trump’s 2016 presidential win. Back in 2016 and to the current day, disinformation spreads faster than wildfire due to social media platforms, bots, and people determined to spread lies. Science Magazine explores one way to fight false information in the article, “Researchers Develop Early Warning System To Fight Disinformation Online.”
A University of Notre Dame research team developed an early warning system using AI designed to identify edited images, fake videos, and other false information online. The project’s goal is to catch social media campaigns that are meant to trigger violence and ruin democratic elections. The project is headed by personnel from Notre Dame’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
The team collected over two million images and other content about the Indonesian 2019 general election from Instagram and Twitter. They discovered that there were spontaneous and coordinated campaigns on social media started to ignite violence and influence the election.
These campaigns use classic propaganda techniques and are dangerous:
“Those campaigns consisted of manipulated images exhibiting false claims and misrepresentation of incidents, logos belonging to legitimate news sources being used on fabricated news stories and memes created with the intent to provoke citizens and supporters of both parties. While the ramifications of such campaigns were evident in the case of the Indonesian general election, the threat to democratic elections in the West already exists. The research team at Notre Dame, comprised of digital forensics experts and specialists in peace studies, said they are developing the system to flag manipulated content to prevent violence, and to warn journalists or election monitors of potential threats in real time.”
The disinformation detecting system is built to be scalable so users can configure it to monitor different content. Current problems the research team is experiencing are figuring out how to optimize scalability for ingestion and processing to deliver fast results.
The newest decade in the twenty-first century might be dubbed the “disinformation age,” because of the false information circulating the Web. Some of it is harmless, but anyone who deals with trolls knows that it does not take much to ignite mob mentality on the Internet.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2020
The Online Cohorts: A Potential Blind Sport
April 15, 2020
In a conversation last week, a teacher told me, “We are not prepared to teach classes online.” I sympathized. What appears trivial to a person who routinely uses a range of technology, a person accustomed to automatic teller machines, a mobile phone, and an Alexa device may be befuddled. Add to the sense of having to learn about procedures, there is the challenge of adopting in person skills to instructing students via a different method; for example, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and other video conferencing services. How is that shift going? There are anecdotal reports that the shift is not going smoothly.
That’s understandable. More data will become available as researchers and hopefully some teachers report the efficacy of the great shift from a high touch classroom to a no touch digital setting.
I noted “Students Often Do Not Question Online Information.” The article provides a summary of research that suggests:
students struggle to critically assess information from the Internet and are often influenced by unreliable sources.
Again, understandable.
The article points out a related issue:
“Having a critical attitude alone is not enough. Instead, Internet users need skills that enable them to distinguish reliable from incorrect and manipulative information. It is therefore particularly important for students to question and critically examine online information so they can build their own knowledge and expertise on reliable information,” stated Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia. [Professor Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia from JGU. The study was carried out as part of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU) alliance.]
Online is a catalyst. The original compound is traditional classroom teaching methodologies. The new element is online. The result appears to raise the possibility of a loss of certain thinking skills.
Net net: A long period of adaptation may be ahead. The problem of humans who cannot do math or think in a manner that allows certain statements to be classified as bunk and others as not bunk is likely to have a number of downstream consequences.
In short, certain types of thinking and critical analysis may become quite rare. Informed decisions may not be helpful if the information upon which a choice is based operates from a different type of fact base.
Maybe not so good?
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2020
Petrucci Music Library: Refreshing and Mostly Free
April 15, 2020
One of the most important things video content creators need is music. Music licensing fees are expensive and creators on a budget usually cannot afford them. The solution is public domain music, but that is more difficult to find than you think. The solution is the Wikipedia equivalent of public domain music: IMSLP. This is an organization:
“IMSLP, also known as the International Music Score Library Project or Petrucci Music Library, was started in 2006. The logo on the main page is a capital letter A. It was taken from the beginning of the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. It was published in Venice in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci, the library’s namesake. The IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library is currently owned and run by Project Petrucci LLC, a company created with the sole purpose of managing this site.”
Using the IMSLP requires a small subscription fee of $3/month or $28.00/year. Despite the fee, the library offers a catered content free of audio files, scores, no download waits, nor ads.
Users can also upload their music to IMSLP under a creative commons license and have their work heard all over the world.
Searching for public domain music is risky for anything newer than the 1920s. Music can easily be labeled as “public domain,” but it is the Internet and you cannot trust anything unless you do your research. If you pay the subscription fee, IMSLP’s content is all public domain and you do not need to worry about copyright infringements.
Whitney Grace, April 13, 2020
Northern Lights: Classification Enables Classification
April 10, 2020
Old technology is being reborn as Northern Lights takes ABI Inform subsets from the 1980s and repackages them as a machine learning powered knowledge management platform. Yahoo Finance digs into the wheel of Internet past in the story, “Northern Light To Create Custom Search And Content Aggregation Solutions For Large Enterprises.” Northern Light is a company that specializes in content aggregation, enterprise search, and machine learning to provide knowledge management solutions. For twenty years, Northern Light built custom knowledge management platforms for market research sights, global enterprises, and competitive intelligence.
Northern Light’s newest project is a blast from the ABI Inform subsets past:
“One of Northern Light’s first custom solutions was announced by Global Venture, a natural resource consulting company. The solution, called Prospector, enables automated search and analysis of 43-101 reports, a national instrument for the Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects within Canada, which are required of Canadian mineral exploration and mining companies listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V) or the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Disclosures covered by the 43-101 code include mineral exploration progress, reporting of resources and reserves, and more. 43-101 reports average 500 pages long and can reach 1000 pages. Traditional search which returns a list of documents is not helpful when the documents are so big.”
Global Venture worked with Northern Light to develop Prospector and it solved a huge search and content aggregation issue. Prospector was designed to digest 43-101 forms that are filled with loads of text and data tables that are in different formats. Investors dig through these forms for specific information that can lead to a useful insight. The machine learning aspect of Prospector saves investors a lot of research time.
Northern Light is working on other projects that requires custom knowledge management solutions. It appears old ideas still have value if they are revamped for modern technology.
Whitney Grace, April 10, 2020
Google Stadia: Amazon Jungle Sounds Startling Googzilla Maybe?
April 9, 2020
I used to live in Campinas, Brazil. Not the jungle exactly, but in the 1950s there were some interesting critters roaming around. At night, if you were lucky, we could hear snuffing at door jams. Yep, big cats, and not the Instagram type either.
Amazon announced in the way of the Bezos bulldozer that it would be getting into the online game business. You can read about that move in “Amazon Pushes into Making Video Games, Not Just Streaming Their Play.”
That bulldozer gear shift may have frightened some Googlers. A lot. DarkCyber noted “Google Stadia Now Free to Anyone with a Gmail Address.” The write up stated:
Google’s video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday. To sweeten the deal, Google is also giving new users two months of Stadia Pro — including access to nine games — for free. Existing Stadia Pro subscribers won’t be charged for the next two months of the service, Google said. Previously, access to Stadia required purchasing the $129 Google Stadia Premiere Edition, a bundle that includes a Chromecast Ultra, a wireless Stadia Controller, and three months of Stadia Pro, the service that offered free games and video streams up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with HDR lighting.
If free doesn’t work, what’s next? A Microsoft Bing play like paying people to use a Web search service which is not particularly robust. Perhaps Google will offer coupons or run discounts on weekends like Harbor Freight. Green Stamps were popular with my mother in the late 1940s. Maybe Google could try that as a way to generate some excitement?
How long will the Googlers working on games stick to the project? Google initiatives die when the wizards realize they might miss a bonus or be left out of a really hot project that will ignite their career.
Will online games become another Dodgeball? Wait, I hear the Bezos bulldozer. Even I am frightened of the sound of crushing hopes, dreams, and shopping options. Yikes. How fast can Googzilla run?
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2020
Google: Innovation Never Ends
April 9, 2020
As Jack Dorsey pledges $1 billion to good causes and Facebook introduces a service which forever will remain under wraps, Google is innovating as well. “YouTube Is Reportedly Planning to Launch an In-App Rival to Viral Video-Sharing App TikTok Before the End of 2020” reports just that—A me to of TikTok. Even the somewhat interesting team of Jeffrey Katzenberg (movie mogul) and Meg Whitman (manager extraordinaire and failed politician) went in a comparatively new direction.
The article about the TikTok initiative at Google reports:
This feature is called “Shorts,” and will live within YouTube’s existing mobile app…
Is the idea is to further reduce a viewer’s ability to focus and absorb long form content. DarkCyber knows that watching a video such as an online learning lecture taxes the brain. With about half the students participating in online learning showing up and even fewer paying attention, reducing attention spans is obviously a step forward.
DarkCyber is convinced that tiny screens, even smaller tinier concentration skills, and sponsored messages represent a breakthrough.
With solving death eluding the online ad giant, cloning a short form video puts other innovators on notice.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2020
Patience: In Short Supply in an Age of Digital Surplus
April 7, 2020
Humans are impatient, here-and-now creatures. CFOTech explains that patience is now a lost virtue in the article, “How Impatience Drives Our Digital Behaviour.” According to the article, Google research shows that 53% of mobile users leave a page if it doesn’t load in three-seconds or less. There is also research that dates back to 2012 from Microsoft that states if one Web site loads slower than another, people will avoid returning. Speed means revenue.
Want some facts about online shopping? Once consumers place something in their online shopping carts, they usually have second thoughts in twenty-two seconds. Even more interesting is that if the digital checkout process takes longer than half a minute, consumers are likely to cancel the transaction. Consumers want a speedy checkout and if their credit cards are not verified in ten-seconds, the sale disappears.
What is the impact of this? There are two reasons:
“First, it is a tangible illustration of how revenue is tied to the speed of your services. This is only going to become more critical as digital channels account for a larger portion of an organisation’s sales. According to Gartner, 37% of enterprise sales will be conducted through digital sales and digital channels by 2020. Similarly, a recent survey by McKinsey shows that on average, 35% of a company’s revenues worldwide are digitised.
Second, it shows a challenge that many of us are becoming more familiar with or exposed to.
It is now common for a single app to call upon a range of third-party services in order to complete a transaction. These microservices add slowness to many Web pages. Want to see microservices in action? Check out the British tabloids online. How do you ensure elements that you do not own or host are performing as expected and not introducing delays that have material flow-on impacts to your own app’s user experience (and the revenue you draw from that)?”
The operational idea is that you own your customer’s digital experience, but not the services that the experience runs on. The reality is that people with jobs in online want to stay employed, not deliver a service that works. Check out the latest version of Newsnow.co.uk on your mobile device. The ads make scanning headlines a chore, not a learning experience. I take that back. I have learned to go to Newslookup.com.
The thirst for ad dollars frustrates many who want a Web site that works smoothly. I know I do.
Whitney Grace, April 7, 2020
The US Newspaper Industry: Extinction Event
April 7, 2020
I am in rural Kentucky because of a newspaper. I left the wonderful world of suburban Washington, DC, to live near a mine drainage system. Oh, sure, I worked at a diversified newspaper committed to electronic publishing, but a mine run off is a mine run off.
I read “Local Newspapers Are Facing Their Own Coronavirus Crisis.”
I spotted an interesting statement about the newspaper industry in the US:
Researchers have long worried that the next recession – which economists say is already upon us — “could be an extinction-level event for newspapers,” said Penelope Abernathy, a University of North Carolina professor who studies the news industry.
Extinction event. Interesting phrase. The write up offered some factoids:
- More than 2,100 cities and tows have lost a newspaper (mostly weeklies) in the last 15 years
- Newsroom employment has shrunk by 50 percent since 2004
- Twenty global news publishers expect a median 23% decline in 2020 ad sales
- Lee Enterprises announced salary reductions and furloughs
- The Tampa Bay Times, owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, cut five days of its print edition and announced furloughs
- C&G Newspapers, which publishes 19 weekly newspapers near Detroit, suspended print publication
What snagged my attention was the last paragraph in the article:
Editor, publisher and owner Louis Fortis is keeping the website operating and promises to resume printing at some point, in some form. Yet he’s feeling the same uncertainty as millions of other Americans. “I’m very disappointed,” he said. “On the other hand, you have to look at the big picture. People are dying.”
Interesting. On one hand the person is disappointed. On the other hand, people are dying.
What’s this mean? Gnostic puzzles must be eyeball magnets.
Historical fact: The Courier Journal’s Barry Bingham Jr. understood the change electronic publishing would have in the late 1970s. How did that work out?
Gannett, announced 15-day furloughs and pay cuts for many employees.
Gannett purchased the Courier Journal in the late 1980s.
How did that work out? Electronic information is not a solution. Flowing digits work like a high pressure water stream in the ill fated FlowTex system; that is, high pressure water directed at an object erodes that object, blasting it into tiny particles in some cases. Where once an edifice stood, only fragments remain.
Print newspapers are going to fall over. Money bandages won’t work.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2020
DeepDyve Offers Viable Alternative To Academic Paywalls
March 30, 2020
Academic paywalls are the bane of researchers even in the midst of the current health crisis. Why? Unless you are affiliated with a university or learning institution, you do not have immediate access to credible academic databases. Sure, there are there public libraries, but their database resources are limited . There might be an alternative solution that is actually viable and affordable: DeepDyve.
What is DeepDyve?
“DeepDyve offers an affordable monthly subscription service that gives unlimited full-text access to an amazing collection of premium academic publications.”
Users have access to over eighteen million articles, including full text pieces from over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals. The great thing about DeepDyve is that it is free for freelancers to create accounts, save their searches, curate their content, and export their citations. The freelance version of DeepDyve is limited to articles from Google Scholar (a notoriously low quality database), PubMed, and abstracts from all other publications. DeepDyve has a Pro account option for $49/month or $360/year that gives users access to all content.
That is much cheaper than signing up for academic databases on an individual basis as well as allows users to research from their own home without an academic institution affiliation. However does the cheaper price offer decent research materials?
DeepDyve does not appear to be hiding anything, because it lists all the different resources users can access with a subscription fee. Users can explore resources by research topic and see what a Deepdyve subscription offers.
DeepDyve could be a newer model for academic database and journal access. The big academic publishers still hold tons of power, but companies like DeepDyve could turn the publishing tide.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2020
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