Some Things Change, Others Do Not: Google and Content
January 20, 2017
After reading Search Engine Journal’s, “The Evolution Of Semantic Search And Why Content Is Still King” brings to mind how there RankBrain is changing the way Google ranks search relevancy. The article was written in 2014, but it stresses the importance of semantic search and SEO. With RankBrain, semantic search is more of a daily occurrence than something to strive for anymore.
RankBrain also demonstrates how far search technology has come in three years. When people search, they no longer want to fish out the keywords from their query; instead they enter an entire question and expect the search engine to understand.
This brings up the question: is content still king? Back in 2014, the answer was yes and the answer is a giant YES now. With RankBrain learning the context behind queries, well-written content is what will drive search engine ranking:
What it boils to is search engines and their complex algorithms are trying to recognize quality over fluff. Sure, search engine optimization will make you more visible, but content is what will keep people coming back for more. You can safely say content will become a company asset because a company’s primary goal is to give value to their audience.
The article ends with something about natural language and how people want their content to reflect it. The article does not provide anything new, but does restate the value of content over fluff. What will happen when computers learn how to create semantic content, however?
Whitney Grace, January 20, 2016
Google Popular Times Now in Real Time
January 20, 2017
Just a quick honk about a little Google feature called Popular Times. LifeHacker points out an improvement to the tool in, “Google Will Now Show You How Busy a Business Is in Real Time.” To help users determine the most efficient time to shop or dine, the feature already provided a general assessment of businesses’ busiest times. Now, though, it bases that information on real-time metrics. Writer Thorin Klosowski specifies:
The real time data is rolling out starting today. You’ll see that it’s active if you see a ‘Live’ box next to the popular times when you search for a business. The data is based on location data and search terms, so it’s not perfect, but will at least give you a decent idea of whether or not you’ll easily find a place to sit at a bar or how packed a store might be. Alongside the real-time data comes some other info, including how long people stay at a location on average and hours by department, which is handy when a department like a pharmacy or deli close earlier the rest of a store.
Just one more way Google tries to make life a little easier for its users. That using it provides Google with even more free, valuable data is just a side effect, I’m sure.
Cynthia Murrell, January 20, 2017
Are You Really Beefing up Your Search Skills?
January 18, 2017
Everyone’s New Year’s resolution is usually to lose weight. When January swings around again, that resolution went out the door with the spring-cleaning. Exercise can be a challenge, but you can always exercise your search skills by reading Medium’s article, “Google Search Tricks To Become A Search Power User.” Or at least the article promises to improve your search skills.
Let’s face it, searching on the Web might seem simple, but it requires a little more brainpower than dumping keywords into a search box. Google makes searching easier and is even the Swiss army knife of answering basic questions. The Medium article does go a step further by drawing old school search tips, such as the asterisk, quotes, parentheses, and others. These explanations, however, need to be read more than once to understand how the tools work:
My favorite of all, single word followed by a ‘*’ will do wonders. But yeah this will not narrow your results; still it keeps a wider range of search results. You’ll need to fine tune to find exactly what you want. This way is useful in case when you don’t remember more than a word or two but you still you want to search fully of it.
Having used some of these tips myself, they actually make searching more complicated than taking a little extra time to read the search results. I am surprised that they did not include the traditional Boolean operators that usually work, more or less. Sometimes search tips cause more trouble than they are worth.
Whitney Grace, January 18, 2016
HonkinNews for January 17, 2017 Now Available
January 17, 2017
This week’s HonkinNews takes a look at Yahoo’s post Verizon name. No, our suggestion of yabba dabba hoo or was it “hoot” was not ignored by Yahoo’s marketing wizards. We also highlight Alphabet Google’s erasure of two letters from its “alphabet.” Goners are “S” and “T”. Palantir is hiring a people centric person. The fancy title may have an interesting spin. Two enterprise search vendors kick off 2017 with a blizzard of buzzwords. The depth of the cacaphones is remarkable because search by any other name would return results with questionable precision and recall. The featured story is the Mitre’s Corporation Jason Report. If you have an interest in artificial intelligence and warfighting, the report provides some insight into what the US Department of Defense may be considering. But the highlight of the unclassified document is a helpful description of Google’s TPU. The seven minute program is at this link. For fans of XQuery, we have a bit of input for you too. Proprietary XQuery too. The program is produced in old fashioned black and white and enhanced with theme music from the days of the Stutz Bearcat. From the hotbed of search and content processing, HonkinNews is different. We’re presenting information other big time outfits ignore. Mitre is a variant of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research. There you go. Live from Harrod’s Creek.
Kenny Toth, January 17, 2017
OpenText Goes Cognitive
January 17, 2017
The Canadian roll up of ageing information access products has a new angle for 2017. No, it is not the OpenText “innovation” tour. No, it is not adding Alexa to its mind boggling array of content access systems such as BRS Search and IDI Information Dimension’s Basis. Not even the historical Fulcrum product gets an Alexa skill.
The future for OpenText is … a next generation cognitive platform.
Even more fascinating is that OpenText has had a Christine Maxwell moment and named the product Magellan. Who remembers the Magellan search and content access system? Ah, no one. I am not surprised. I met a millennial who had never used a camera with roll film yesterday.
If you want to know a bit more about the exciting old-new products, navigate to this OpenText page or follow this link to a video. Yes, a video because OpenText is definitely in step with the next generation of enterprise software customers.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2017
Apache Tika Could Be the Google of Dark Web?
January 16, 2017
Conventional search engines can effectively index text based content. However, Apache Tika, a system developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) can identify and analyze all kinds of content. This might enable law enforcement agencies to track all kind of illicit activities over Dark Web and possibly end them.
An article by Christian Mattmann titled Could This Tool for the Dark Web Fight Human Trafficking and Worse? that appears on Startup Smart says:
At present the most easily indexed material from the web is text. But as much as 89 to 96 percent of the content on the internet is actually something else – images, video, audio, in all thousands of different kinds of non-textual data types. Further, the vast majority of online content isn’t available in a form that’s easily indexed by electronic archiving systems like Google’s.
Apache Tika, which Mattmann helped develop bridges the gap by analyzing Metadata of the content type and then identifying content of the file using techniques like Named Entity Recognition (NER). Apache Tika was instrumental in tracking down players in Panama Scandal.
If Apache Tika is capable of what it says, many illicit activities over Dark Web like human trafficking, drug and arms peddling can be stopped in its tracks. As the author points out in the article:
Employing Tika to monitor the deep and dark web continuously could help identify human- and weapons-trafficking situations shortly after the photos are posted online. That could stop a crime from occurring and save lives.
However, the system is not sophisticated enough to handle the amount of content that is out there. Being an open source code, in near future someone may be able to make it capable of doing so. Till then, the actors of Dark Web can heave a sigh of relief.
Vishal Ingole, January 16, 2017
RAVN Flaps Amidst a Flurry of Feathers
January 12, 2017
I read “Abraaj Drives Innovation in Private Equity Market with Implementation of RAVN’s Cognitive Search Solution.” The main idea is that RAVN, a vendor of enterprise search, has snagged a customer. That’s good. What’s interesting about the write up is the language of the “news.” Here’s a rundown of the words I highlighted as flaps of the RAVN’s marketing department wings:
- Access
- Artificial intelligence and AI
- Classify
- Cognitive search
- Collaborate
- Component
- Connect enterprise
- Data mining
- Deal flow
- Differentiation
- Drive innovation
- Dynamic decisions
- Engagement
- Engine as in “cognitive engine”
- Experts and expertise
- Extract
- Functional knowledge
- Ground breaking
- Growth markets organization
- Highly distributed network
- Internal and external content
- Intelligently transforms
- Interrelationships
- Knowledge graph
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge sources
- Leverage
- Lifecycle
- Monitoring
- Multi geography
- Navigate
- Phases
- Platform
- Proprietary
- Sector knowledge.
- Sectoral
- Secure
- Solutions
- Teams
- Transformation
- Unstructured
- Visualize
What’s left out? No analytics, which is one of the must have functions for a modern search and content processing system. My hunch is that RAVN has numbers in its nest. In the millennial editing frenzy, counting visitors and other useful items was overlooked. Amazing stuff. No wonder some folks roll their eyes when enterprise search vendors trot out keyword search dressed in rhetoric honed by Sophists.
For more lingo which makes search seem more than it is, review the list of cacaphones at this link. Ah, the cacophony of search and retrieval vendors.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2017
Epi-Search and dtSearch
January 11, 2017
I read about Epi-Search in “Epi-Search, A Free Academic Resource, Lets Researchers Enter Up to 10,000 Words of Text and, Using a dtSearch® Engine API, Find “More Like This” Across the ISCE Library.” The idea is a good one. Plug in a research summary or journal article abstract. The system then outputs related documents. The search plumbing is provided by dtSearch, a vendor based in Bethesda, Maryland.
I ran a test using the description of my Cyberosint: Next Generation Information Access monograph on the system at this link. The system returned 10 hits to related documents. Here’s a partial list:
Only the “Penal Populism” was in the same city as the ball park in which I kick around.
The link to Google search results was in the ball park’s parking lot. But the majority of the Google hits point to sites for cyber security, not for the use of open source intelligence to obtain operational intelligence. The Google search grabbed the notion of bad actors compromising network integrity. Important, but not the game I follow. The Google search results returned by the Epi system were PDF files and advertisements.
On a side note, there is a product called Episerer which is offered by a company called Epi. You can get information at this link. Epi’s content management system includes a search engine marketed as Find. Perhaps the name clash can be resolved?
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2017
Coveo Search: Reveal Engine
January 11, 2017
Enterprise search is alive and well when it comes to pivots and jargon. One example is Coveo’s adoption of the moniker “Reveal Engine.” The idea is that one can search to find needed information. If the notion is unclear, you can watch the “Coveo Reveal Engine Explainer Video.” The idea is that Coveo’s software puts intelligence everywhere. I love those categorical affirmatives too.
Coveo explains:
Meet Coveo Reveal Engine, the self-learning technology in the Coveo platform that makes intelligent search even smarter. It continuously analyzes your visitors’ click stream data and behavior patterns captured by search usage analytics, then accurately serves up the content that is most likely to drive conversions and ensure self-service success. In other words, Coveo learns which content delivers the best outcomes and then automatically tunes search results to ensure the right content always rises to the top – without any manual effort on your part. Think of it as having a built-in concierge that intuitively knows what your visitors are looking for. It makes intelligent recommendations based on a deep understanding of what has worked best for others. Coveo understands your visitors’ intent. It auto-completes search terms, provides relevant related search suggestions, and even recommends complementary content they hadn’t originally sought out.
The pivot is that Coveo is positioning its search system to handle self service questions. More information about Coveo is available at www.coveo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2017
Improve Your B2B Search with Klevu
January 6, 2017
Ecommerce sites rely on a strong search tool to bring potential customers to their online stores and to find specific products without a hassle. B2B based companies have the same goal, but they need an entire different approach although they still rely on search. If you run a B2B company, you might want to take a gander at Klevu and their solutions: “Search Requirements For A B2B Retailer.”
In the blog post, Klevu explains that B2B companies have multiple customer groups that allow different pricing, products, discounts, etc. The customers see prices based on allocation from the store, but they cannot use a single price for every item. Search is also affected by this outcome. Klevu came out with the Klevu Magneto plugin to:
With the help of our partners and our in-house expertise, we came up with a solution that allows such group prices to automatically work with Klevu. The Klevu Magneto plugin fetches the group prices and, at the time of showing the search results, Klevu’s JavaScript determines the relevant price for rendering. We’ve also ensure that this works in Ajax / quick search as well, as this was an important requirement.
The Klevu Magneto plugin also has an SKU search option, maintaining the same landing page within search results, and instant faceted search. Klevu researched the issues that its B2B customers had the most problems with and created solutions. They are actively pursuing ways to resolve bothersome issues that pop up and this is just the start for them.
Whitney Grace, January 6, 2017
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