Behind the Google Search Algorithm
June 16, 2016
Trying to reveal the secrets behind Google’s search algorithm is almost harder than breaking into Fort Knox. Google keeps the 200 ranking factors a secret, what we do know is that keywords do not play the same role that they used to and social media does play some sort of undisclosed factor. Search Engine Journal shares that “Google Released The Top 3 ranking Factors” that offers a little information to help SEO.
Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev shared that the three factors are links, content, and RankBrain-in no particular order. RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system that relies on machine learning to help Google process search results to push the more relevant search results to the top of the list. SEO experts are trying to figure out how this will affect their jobs, but the article shares that:
“We’ve known for a long time that content and links matter, though the importance of links has come into question in recent years. For most SEOs, this should not change anything about their day-to-day strategies. It does give us another piece of the ranking factor puzzle and provides content marketers with more ammo to defend their practice and push for growth.”
In reality, there is not much difference, except that few will be able to explain how artificial intelligence ranks particular sites. Nifty play, Google.
Whitney Grace, June 15, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
SLI Systems Hopeful as Losses Narrow and Revenue Grows
June 14, 2016
The article titled SLI Systems Narrows First-Half Loss on Scoop reports revenue growth and plans to mitigate losses. SLI Systems is a New Zealand-based software as a service (SaaS) business that provides cloud-based search resources to online retailers. Founded in 2001, SLI Systems has already weathered a great deal of storms in the form of the dot-com crash that threatened to stall the core technology (developed at GlobalBrain.) According to a statement from the company, last year’s loss of $502K was an improvement from the loss of $4.1M in 2014. The article states,
“SLI shares have dropped 18 percent in the past 12 months, to trade recently at 76 cents, about half the level of the 2013 initial public offering price of $1.50. The software developer missed its sales forecast for the second half of the 2015 year but is optimistic new chief executive Chris Brennan and Martin Onofrio as chief revenue officer, both Silicon Valley veterans, can drive growth in revenue and earnings.”
The SLI of SLI stands for Search, Learn and (appropriately) Improve. The company hopes to achieve sustainable growth without raising additional capital by continuing to focus on innovation and customer retention rates, which slipped from 90% to 87% recently. Major clients include Lenovo, David Jones, Harvey Norman, and Paul Smith.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Everyone Rejoice! We Now Have Emoji Search
June 1, 2016
It was only a matter of time after image search actually became a viable and useful tool that someone would develop a GIF search. Someone thought it would be a keen idea to also design an emoji search and now, ladies and gentlemen, we have it! Tech Viral reports that “Now You Can Search Images On Google Using Emoji.”
Using the Google search engine is a very easy process, type in a few keywords or a question, click search, and then delve into the search results. The Internet, though, is a place where people develop content and apps just for “the heck of it”. Google decided to design an emoji search option, probably for that very reason. Users can type in an emoji, instead of words to conduct an Internet search.
The new emoji search is based on the same recognition skills as the Google image search, but the biggest question is how many emojis will Google support with the new function?
“Google has taken searching algorithm to the next level, as it is now allowing users to search using any emoji icon. Google stated ‘An emoji is worth a thousand words’. This feature may be highly appreciated by lazy Google users, as they now they don’t need to type a complete line instead you just need to use an emoji for searching images.”
It really sounds like a search for lazy people and do not be surprised to get a variety of results that do not have any relation to the emoji or your intended information need. An emoji might be worth a thousand words, but that is a lot of words with various interpretations.
Whitney Grace, June 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Paid Posts and PageRank
May 27, 2016
Google users rely on the search engine’s quality-assurance algorithm, PageRank, to serve up the links most relevant to their query. Blogger and Google engineer Matt Cutts declares, reasonably enough, that “Paid Posts Should Not Affect Search Engines.” His employer, on the other hand, has long disagreed with this stance. Cutts concedes:
“We do take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them. In fact, we recently finished going through hundreds of ‘empty review’ reports — thank you for that feedback! That means that now is a great time to send us reports of link buyers or sellers that violate our guidelines. We use that information to improve our algorithms, but we also look through that feedback manually to find and follow leads.”
Well, that’s nice to know. However, Cutts emphasizes, no matter how rigorous the quality assurance, there is good reason users may not want paid posts to make it through PageRank at all. He explains:
“If you are searching for information about brain cancer or radiosurgery, you probably don’t want a company buying links in an attempt to show up higher in search engines. Other paid posts might not be as starkly life-or-death, but they can still pollute the ecology of the web. Marshall Kirkpatrick makes a similar point over at ReadWriteWeb. His argument is as simple as it is short: ‘Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with “pay for play” pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.’ I really can’t think of a better way to say it, so I’ll stop there.”
Cynthia Murrell, May 27, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Kardashians Rank Higher Than Yahoo
May 20, 2016
I avoid the Kardashians and other fame chasers, because I have better things to do with my time. I never figured that I would actually write about the Kardashians, but the phrase “never say never” comes into play. As I read Vanity Fair’s “Marissa Mayer Vs. ‘Kim Kardashian’s Ass” : What Sunk Yahoo’s Media Ambitions?” tells a bleak story about the current happenings at Yahoo.
Yahoo has ended many of its services, let go fifteen percent of staff, and there are very few journalists left on the team. The remaining journalists are not worried about producing golden content, they have to compete with a lot already on the Web, especially “Kim Kardashian’s ass” as they say.
When Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo as the CEO in 2012, she was determined to carve out Yahoo’s identity as a tech company. Mayer, however, wanted Yahoo to be media powerhouse, so she hired many well-known journalists to run specific niche projects in popular areas from finance to beauty to politics. It was not a successful move and now Yahoo is tightening its belt one more time. The Yahoo news algorithm did not mesh with the big name journalists, the hope was that their names would soar above popular content such as Kim Kardashian’s ass. They did not.
Much of Yahoo’s current work comes from the Alibaba market. The result is:
“But the irony is that Mayer, a self-professed geek from Silicon Valley, threw so much of her reputation behind high-profile media figures and went with her gut, just like a 1980s magazine editor—when even magazine editors, including those who don’t profess to “get” technology, have long abandoned that practice themselves, in favor of what the geeks in Silicon Valley are doing.”
Mayer was trying to create a premiere media company, but lower quality content is more popular than top of the line journalists. The masses prefer junk food in their news.
Whitney Grace, May 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Signs of Life from Funnelback
May 19, 2016
Funnelback has been silent as of late, according to our research, but the search company has emerged from the tomb with eyes wide open and a heartbeat. The Funnelback blog has shared some new updates with us. The first bit of news is if you are “Searchless In Seattle? (AKA We’ve Just Opened A New Office!)” explains that Funnelback opened a new office in Seattle, Washington. The search company already has offices in Poland, United Kingdom, and New Zealand, but now they want to establish a branch in the United States. Given their successful track record with the finance, higher education, and government sectors in the other countries they stand a chance to offer more competition in the US. Seattle also has a reputable technology center and Funnelback will not have to deal with the Silicon Valley group.
The second piece of Funnelback news deals with “Driving Channel Shift With Site Search.” Channel shift is the process of creating the most efficient and cost effective way to deliver information access and usage to users. It can be difficult to implement a channel shift, but increasing the effectiveness of a Web site’s search can have a huge impact.
Being able to quickly and effectively locate information on a Web site saves time for not only more important facts, but it also can drive sales, further reputation, etc.
“You can go further still, using your search solution to provide targeted experiences; outputting results on maps, searching by postcode, allowing for short-listing and comparison baskets and even dynamically serving content related to what you know of a visitor, up-weighting content that is most relevant to them based on their browsing history or registered account.
Couple any of the features above with some intelligent search analytics, that highlight the content your users are finding and importantly what they aren’t finding (allowing you to make the relevant connections through promoted results, metadata tweaking or synonyms), and your online experience is starting to become a lot more appealing to users than that queue on hold at your call centre.”
I have written about it many times, but a decent Web site search function can make or break a site. Not only does it demonstrate that the Web site is not professional, it does not inspire confidence in a business. It is a very big rookie mistake to make.
Whitney Grace, May 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Moonshot Targets Disease Management, but Might Face Obstacle with Google Management Methods
May 17, 2016
The article on STAT titled Google’s Bold Bid to Transform Medicine Hits Turbulence Under a Divisive CEO explores Google management methods for one of its “moonshot” projects. Namely, the massive company has directed its considerable resources toward overhauling medicine. Verily Life Sciences is the three year-old startup with a mysterious mission and a controversial leader in Andrew Conrad. So far, roughly a dozen Verily players have abandoned the project.
“But “if they are getting off the roller coaster before it gets to the first dip,” something looks seriously wrong, said Rob Enderle, a technology analyst who has tracked Google since its inception. Those who depart well-financed startups usually forsake potential financial windfalls down the line, which further suggests that the people leaving Verily “are losing confidence in the leadership,” he said. No similar brain drain has occurred at Calico, another ambitious Google spinoff, which is focused on increasing the human lifespan.”
Given the scope of the Verily project, which Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, announced that he hoped would significantly change the way we identify, avoid, and handle illness, perhaps Conrad is cracking under the stress. He has maintained complete radio silence and rumors abound that his employees operate under threat of termination for speaking to a reporter.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Update from Lucene
May 10, 2016
It has been awhile since we heard about our old friend Apache Lucene, but the open source search engine has something new, says Open Source Connections in the article, “BM25 The Next Generation Of Lucene Relevance.” Lucene is added BM25 to its search software and it just might improve search results.
“BM25 improves upon TF*IDF. BM25 stands for “Best Match 25”. Released in 1994, it’s the 25th iteration of tweaking the relevance computation. BM25 has its roots in probabilistic information retrieval. Probabilistic information retrieval is a fascinating field unto itself. Basically, it casts relevance as a probability problem. A relevance score, according to probabilistic information retrieval, ought to reflect the probability a user will consider the result relevant.”
Apache Lucene formerly relied on TF*IDF, a way to rank how users value a text match relevance. It relied on two factors: term frequency-how often a term appeared in a document and inverse document frequency aka idf-how many documents the term appears and determines how “special” it is. BM25 improves on the old TF*IDF, because it gives negative scores for terms that have high document frequency. IDF in BM25 solves this problem by adding a 1 value, therefore making it impossible to deliver a negative value.
BM25 will have a big impact on Solr and Elasticsearch, not only improving search results and accuracy with term frequency saturation.
Whitney Grace, May 10, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Do Businesses Have a Collective Intelligence?
May 4, 2016
After working in corporate America for several years, I was amazed by the sheer audacity of its stupidity. I came to the conclusion that many people in corporate America lack intelligence and are slowly skirting insanity’s edge, so when I read Xconomy’s article, “Brainspace Aims To Harness ‘Collective Intelligence’ Of Businesses” made me giggle. I digress. Intelligence really does run rampant in businesses, especially in IT departments the keep modern companies up and running. The digital workspace has created a collective intelligence within a company’s enterprise system and the information is either accessed directly from the file hierarchy or through (the usually quicker) search box.
Keywords within the correct context pertaining to a company are extremely important to semantic search, which is why Brainspace invented a search software that creates a search ontology for individual companies. Brainspace says that all companies create collective intelligence within their systems and their software takes the digitized “brain” and produces a navigable map that organizes the key items into clusters.
“As the collection of digital data on how we work and live continues to grow, software companies like Brainspace are working on making the data more useful through analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning techniques. For example, in 2014 Google acquired London-based Deep Mind Technologies, while Facebook runs a program called FAIR—Facebook AI Research. IBM Watson’s cognitive computing program has a significant presence in Austin, TX, where a small artificial intelligence cluster is growing.”
Building a search ontology by incorporating artificial intelligence into semantic search is a fantastic idea. Big data relies on deciphering information housed in the “collective intelligence,” but it can lack human reasoning to understanding context. An intelligent semantic search engine could do wonders that Google has not even built a startup for yet.
Whitney Grace, May 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Duck Duck Go as a Privacy Conscious Google Alternative
April 26, 2016
Those frustrated with Google may have an alternative. Going over to the duck side: A week with Duck Duck Go from Search Engine Watch shares a thorough first-hand account of using Duck Duck Go for a week. User privacy protection seems to be the hallmark of the search service and there is even an option to enable Tor in its mobile app. Features are comparable, such as one designed to compete with Google’s Knowledge Graph called Instant Answers. As an open source product, Instant Answers is built up by community contributions. As far as seamless, intuitive search, the post concludes,
“The question is, am I indignant enough about Google’s knowledge of my browsing habits (and everyone else’s that feed its all-knowing algorithms) to trade the convenience of instantly finding what I’m after for that extra measure of privacy online? My assessment of DuckDuckGo after spending a week in the pond is that it’s a search engine for the long term. To get the most out of using it, you have to make a conscious change in your online habits, rather than just expecting to switch one search engine for another and get the same results.”
Will a majority of users replace “Googling” with “Ducking” anytime soon? Time will tell, and it will be an interesting saga to see unfold. I suppose we could track the evolution on Knowledge Graph and Instant Answers to see the competing narratives unfold.
Megan Feil, April 26, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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