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December 07, 2008

Hot topics in comp sci vs SEO

To see if there was a correlation between hot topics in SEO and hot topics in IR, I've listed the top 10 in each in no particular order.  I may have forgotten some in SEO because that space is not as ordered at the comp sci one.

SEO popular topics:

 - How to get more traffic to your blog
 - How to use LinkedIn/Twitter/etc to increase your traffic
 - NoIndex /No Follow
 - SearchWiki
 - Guides and ebooks / tutorials on all manner of marketing things
 - x number of easy seo strategies
 - Wordpress themes
 - Link building strategies
 - Social media evolution etc
 - Tools you might be missing etc
 
 Computer science (IR, NLP) popular topics:
 
 - Classifier systems
 - Recommender systems
 - Personalisation
 - Ranking both in SE and SN
 - Information retrieval & browsing
 - Q&A systems
 - System evaluation
 - Information extraction
 - Digital libraries
 - Interfaces and HCI

Not much correlation there sadly.  There's evidence of attention to links in both though and also to personalisation.  I guess that this means that both are not really picking things up from each other.  It's a gap that needs to be bridged.
 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once again, Dr. Obvious saved our days.

Thanks a lot, next time maybe compare apples and bananas?

CJ said...

Hi Ominous Anonymous,

thank you for giving your valuable opionion. I must correct you though, I am not doctor quite yet, and you can of course compare apples and bananas, you just can't add them up very well :)

IR is building the future of search engines and the entire way we are going to interact online. It is rather important for people who are making a living using this technology to be aware of it I believe. Therefore it is a shame to see that SEO people are not heated up about developments in IR and that IR isn't including more marketing oriented topics, because it would perhaps show that SEO work is no longer named "Spam", but better understood.

I'm sorry you had trouble understanding this post. Oh well!

Anonymous said...

It's an interesting thought.
I'm still fairly new to the concepts of SEO and IR. My background is user experience from a customer service view and I've recently begun working for a dotcom so these are topics that I'm delving in to!

So far, my experience of real world people - as opposed to things I'm reading online - is that SEO consultants seem to be predominantly ex-marketing people who are not interested in and don't understand IR.

In my mind there's a lot of areas where the two connect. I think we'll see a lot of changes over the next year as people from more varied backgrounds start understanding and seeing the benefits of IR.

Apples and banana's they may be... they're both still fruit!

CJ said...

Jennikate,

you hit the nail on the head! I hope you enjoy delving into SEO and IR, it's an interesting business :)

Thank you for your comment.

cj

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Science for SEO by Marie-Claire Jenkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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