Archive for March, 2009

But of course, I don’t want to ignore the previous Vincent update – as that was the connection to post #1.

Orion first.  Actually Google did not announce “Orion” – which is a search technology it purchased in 2006, along with it’s college-student developer Ori Allon.  But my guess is that thanks to Greg Sterling’s new article containing that title the term “Orion Release” will stick.  Here’s how Danny Sullivan described the technology back in April 2006:

It sounds like Allon mainly developed an algorithm useful in pulling out better summaries of web pages. In other words, if you did a search, you’d be likely to get back extracted sections of pages most relevant to your query.

Ori himself wrote the following in his press release:

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

Google actually announced two changes:

Longer Snippets.  When users input queries of more than three words,  the Google results will now contain more lines of text in order to provide more information and context.   As a reminder, a snippet is a search result that starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text.  Google’s research must have shown that regular-length snippets were not providing enough information to searchers to provide a clear preference for a result based on their longer search term – as their stated intent is to provide enhanced information that will improve the searcher’s ability to determine the relevance of items listed in the SERPs.

Having said this, I don’t see any difference.  My slav…. I mean my 12-yo son (who has been doing keyword analysis since he was 10, so no slouch at this) ran ten tests on Google to see if we could find a difference (I won’t detail all the one- and two- vs 3+ word combinations we tried – if you want to have the list, leave a comment or send a twitter to arthurofsun and I will forward it to you).  But shown below are the results for France Travel vs France Travel Guides for Northern France:

As you can see, there is absolutely no difference in snippet length for the two searches - and this was universally true across all the searches we ran.    So I’m not sure – I wonder if Ori Allon, who wrote the post, could help us out on this one.

Also, I am somewhat confused.  If you type in more keywords, the search engine has more information by which to determine the relevance of  a result.  So why would I need more information?  Where I need more information is in the situation of a 3- keyword search, which will return a broad set of results that I will need to filter based on the information contained in a longer snippet.

Enhanced Search Associations.  The bigger enhancement – and the one that seems most likely to derive from the original Orion technology – are enhanced associations between keywords.  Basically if you type in a keyword – Ori uses the example  ”principles of physics” – then the new algorithms understand that there are other ideas related to this I may be interested in, like “Big Bang” or “Special Relativity.”  The way Google has implemented this is to put a set of related keywords at the bottom of the first SERP, which you may click on.  When you click, it returns a new set of search results based on the keyword you clicked.  Why at the bottom of the first SERP?  My hypothesis would be that if the searcher has gone to the bottom of the page, it means that they haven’t found what they are looking for.  So this is the right place in the user experience to prompt them with related keywords that they may find more relevant to the content they are seeking. 

From my perspective, this feels like the “People who liked this item also bought…” widget on most comparison shopping sites (which I know something about, having been the head of marketing for SHOP.COM.)  I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this – I’m just trying to make an analogy to the type of user experience Google is trying to create.

Shown below is an example of a enhanced search associations from a search on the broad term “credit derivatives in the USA”:

 As I expected, the term “credit default swaps” – which is the major form of credit derivative – shows as an associated keyword.  What I do not see in the list – and was surprised  – was any reference to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), which is the organization that has developed the standards and rules by which most derivatives are created.  It does, however, show up for the search on the keyword “credit default swap.”  I’d be curious to understand just exactly how the algorithm has been tuned to make trade-offs between broad concepts (i.e, credit derivatives, which is a category)) and very focused concepts (i.e. credit default swap, which is a specific product).  Maybe I can get Ori to opine on that as well, but most likely that comes under the category of secret sauce.

Anyway, fascinating and it certainly shows that Google continues to evolve the state of IR. 

Well, I’ll just have to leave the Vincent release until tomorrow.  Something else happened this morning I need to do a quick entry about.  Sigh…..

Twitter:Facebook :: IM:Email

which scares me to death as a lover of the English language.  The more we get used to Twitter, the loss of deeper content across other parts of our written world will increase.

“Whan that Aprille with her shoures sote….Twitter comes to dash our houpes.

More later..

Actually I thought of a better way to adapt Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote. The Thoghtes of Twitter hath perced to the rote….”

So it begins…..

I have been building and marketing online businesses since 1992, and I have never had a regular blog.  Never seemed important when I was “stoking the star maker machinery of the high tech throng ” (apologies to Joanie Mitchell).  100 hour weeks, people to hire, budgets to get approved, boards to assuage, teams to motivate, CEOs to placate, and all the rest.  Those people who did blogs either had too much time on their hands or had a business marketing their visions for high tech (like my buddies/classmates Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin … hmmm.. am I allowed to mention these two in the same sentence?) and so used the blogs as a podium to further expand on their visions from a daily and more immediate perspective.  Guy was kind enough to support my first attempts at a blog, but that effort quickly died when he and the folks at Garage Technology Ventures were kind enough to engage me for a travel adventure of theirs called cfares (which is still alive and doing well).   100 hour weeks…no time to blog.

But while I was head down with the yoke around my neck, blogging evolved into the mainstream (as Seth, Guy, and others predicted) and then social media got added into the mix.  Now, if you are going to be anywhere in online, you’d better BE online (so “Hello World!”).  That means exactly what it says – your identity, the creative output of your soul, the thing that Marx in his Hegelian days said that every time you put it forth you put forth a piece of yourself – must be extended into the online realm.  Privacy as we once knew it is gone.  With the web, we have now become the Transparent Society, where much of what we do (and I fear someday all of what we do) is there for anyone in the world to see.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.  It means we have to be more honest in what we say and do, since there are more ways to check the veracity of what people and organizations tell us.  What would be wrong if private sessions of various government agencies were available online in real time where activities had to be  judged in the harsh light of public opinion?  Don’t you think that might have an impact on how bureaucrats decided how to spend our tax dollars?  What about someone who behaves badly (hopefully not you)?  What they do is no longer as private as it once was – bad actors can be outed in a heartbeat.  I had a personal case recently where someone tried to hijack my email address.  Once I called him on it publicly, he backed down, knowing that his reputation could easily be damaged by his own bad acts if it got out into the Twittersphere.

Which brings me to the story my son told me yesterday – urban legend or not (actually not) - about doctors who were Twittering while they were doing heart surgery.  This is the ultimate example of how more and more everything is being connected in real-time through vehicles like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, wikia, and hundeds of others (264 at the last count -we actually do spend time researching the entire social media universe).  We do not just have presences online, we are being on line.  Just do a search on my online username – arthurofsun.  In Google, depending on the day, you can find between 500 and 1,000 search results from me (searching my name is a bit harder because there are some very famous people with my name), including the 3 comments I made yesterday about Google’s Vincent release.  And I haven’t been online much until now.  And oh, btw, if you look at the entries, they have my age (how dare they), my location, my interests, my profession and other facts that would have been more or less private in the olden days. Try someone who publishes every day like Danny Sullivan (actually nowadays it’s every 30 seconds because Danny has become a Tweetaholic)- he’s got 1.7mm entries.  Give me a year or two and I’ll be right up there. 

All of this is to say there is a fundamental shift going on. We are living and being more online every day.  One of the impacts of this is that now, especially with Twitter and Facebook, everyone has become a publisher.  You get up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit at your computer, and the first thing you do is go to Facebook or Twitter and make an entry.  Then if you are like me, or Danny, or Guy, or Seth, or Stephen Spencer, etc. etc. you write 2-3 paragraphs in your blog.  Then you go do your other work – you know, the one that pays the bills? 

So we are now all publishers. Which means the nature of news and what is relevant information has changed utterly.  And that’s where I’m going to leave it for today, because tomorrow I am going to get back up on my soapbox and talk in more detail about why Google’s Vincent release really isn’t a good thing.