Science for SEO

November 28, 2008

TGIF - let's celebrate :)

Welcome to another weekly installment of TGIF here at SFS. I hope the week has treated you well and that you have had happy surprises along the way, and an excellent Thanksgiving for the American readers amongst you. Everyone else will have to wait for xmas for fun and games and good food. Unless like me you're invited to a posh dinner in your favourite restaurant like I am tonight :)

Without further ado...

Geeky xmas presents you might want to add to your list:

I love these awesome T-shirts from Nerdy T-shirts. I'd quite like the "Reading is for awesome people" and the PacMan one.

ThinkGeek (which is the ultimate geek gift site) do super strong caffeine comestibles, and I love the LED umbrella. They have some very nice geeky baby and kids clothes as well.

Firebox do these very cute lego brick USB keys. Definitely want one. Also feel free to send through this delicious looking box of munchies my way.

Scientifics do the amphibian solar powered car, way cool. And seriously, who wouldn't want a pair of night vision googles like these?

From Amazon (who I buy too many things from) I like the "Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life" book, and "The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor's Guide" - build away. My wish list is huge, so I'll stop there.

Here are or Geeky facts of the week:

The first ever Internet marketing campaign was in 1978, when an advertising note was sent via ARPANET (precursor to the Web) to about 600 people on the thing. It advertised a new computer, and as a result Digital Equipment Corp. sold over 20 of them at about $1 million each.

If you opened up the case of the original Macintosh, you will find 47 signatures, one for each member of Apple's Macintosh division as of 1982.

Your brain has about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) neurons.

Some divers in 1901 discovered the oldest mechanical computer ever. It is a 2,100 year old machine and was used to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in the English dictionary. It refers to a lung disease caused by inhaling particles from volcanoes.

Wonder Woman co-creator William Moulton Marston also created the systolic blood-pressure test, which led to the creation of the polygraph (lie detector).

I also took the geek test, and guess what...

77% Geek

Why I used Blogger

I'm often asked why I use blogger to host my blog, being a knowledgeable SEO person, and also a computer scientist. "I should know better" is the main idea. I advocate using Wordpress instead, and tell everyone else to do so when they ask me what they should use for their blog...for their business.

Wordpress is better:

You can host it yourself - unless you mess up it's highly unlikely to go missing
There are tons of tools for SEO and templates, etc...
Highly customisable
Search engine friendly
Publishing is fast
You can extend it as far as you like

But:

Can be a pain to install
If you host yourself it requires dosh
Bit harder to install Adsense

Blogger is better for noobs:

Easy to setup
Login is using your Google account
Lots of templates available
Silly easy to use
Free
Easy to add little apps
Easy to sort out your template how you want it with drag and drop and customise HTML
You can easy get Adsense on there

But:

not so customisable
.blogspot doesn't look too professional for businesses
Doesn't support all the Wordpress plugins

Feel free to add to the list, it's by no means exhaustive.

Why did I do it then? Well it was a bit of an experiment and a way of showing my colleagues that if you engaged yourself in your blog properly and were genuine in your intentions, then any blog platform would work. I hosted my travel blogs with blogger prior to SFS and they got a lot of traffic without me doing a great deal.

Hang on...I did do quite a bit. But it honestly hasn't been hard or something I'd consider as work. For both my travel blogs and SFS, I have been involved in relevant communities. On Twitter my followers and the people I follow are all into the same stuff, I use Sphinn for SFS and I am involved there. I do submit my posts, but that's what it's there for and it's all about sharing with the community. I am involved in forums, and Linkedin groups. That's about it actually.

In short - I'm involved socially in my area of interest. I interact, I share, I help out too when I can, I take the time with the people I connect with. I like them, i hope they like me too, and I love what we talk about. I write (I like to think) good content, and I take the time with my posts.

How much time a week do I spend on my blog? humm..maybe an hour a day. I take Saturdays off and the odd busy day. It's a hobby but it has served me well, I've had quite a few job offers (thank you I'm flattered), and I've most importantly met some excellent people.

If you're running a business, use Wordpress, but honestly, it won't work if you're not involved in your community. A blog isn't an extension of your website that you call "blog" - it's a gateway to information share and a whole interesting community. You can reach clients, but you can also learn too.

If you're running something personal, honestly this blog is proof that any platform can work for you as long as you're dedicated and passionate.

that's my 2 beans about it anyway :)

November 26, 2008

SEO ladies, fancy being a Syster?

I'm always trying to build a little bridge between the SEO and the Science communities, I think they both have a lot to learn from each other. Once in a while I like to try and bring them both together because both communities share some commonalities.

In the SEO world the girls over at Seo Chicks keep the Girly flag nice and high, and over in computing the Anita Borg institute does much of the same but in a different way (they trademarked the word Syster). I'm one of 3 girls doing a PhD in a computer science discipline at my University. At conferences, there are always more men than girls. The SEO conferences on the other hand are far more girl friendly, and the women in SEO such as Jill Whalen and Donna Fontenot for example are strong characters.

In computing the girl zone is in trouble, as women represent under 20% of professionals. It was nearly 40% in the 80's (ACM report).

Let us not forget that Ada Lovelace was the 1st ever computer programmer, 6 women were the original programmers of ENIAC, and Susan Kare designed most of your Mac interface and icons. Karen Sparck-Jones was one the the pioneers in information retrieval...and Karen said "Computing is far too important to be left to the men" when she won the BCS Lovelace medal.

Here is my list of top 10 computing chicks (alive today) in no particular order:

Go through this wikipedia list of computer scientists and have a vodka for every woman you come across. Don't worry you won't be getting very drunk.

Is SEO too important to be left to the men? There are a lot more women in SEO than in computing, there's quite a comprehensive list on the blogroll of "Women of SEO". Don't try the vodka game here, you will be in a bad way :s

Is there a way to attract more girls over to computing? How many of the SEO ladies out there would make excellent computer scientists? Can computing poach a few? You know, seeing we're in trouble and all...

Google, my backend system

Right now, we're the web equivalent of the horse and cart. We have invented the wheel, and domesticated animals and this has revolutionised our existence, especially the way in which we do business, but...I don't see Ferrari's, E-type Jags or anything like that right now in web world.

Are we heading that way? Yes, for sure.

Search is not supposed to be something independent of the rest of your web experience, or actually you digital experience. You are going to be able to access search from any device or environment without actually having to go to a search engine.

Imagine you're typing away an article for your photography blog. The intelligent environment you're in is already aware that you are writing something for you blog, because it has seen patterns and features develop over time. You highlight something and summon Google. It does something pretty cool. It goes out with the highlighted words as a query, but already has the context of the query, because of it knowing all about your writing for your photography blog.

It rushes out, and visits all the top results. These results are dependant not just on the keyword phrase but also on the other variables gathered from your intelligent environment. Then it pulls out all the key concepts and information and writes you a summary to answer your question. You can "repair" the results by typing something like "No, I meant..." or "Perfect! Tell me more about the canon". And off it goes again. Or "Let me see the top 5 documents", or "Show me related information",...

From a mobile device, you could summon Google during a conversation with someone for example. Imagine you're trying to figure out where the closest restaurant is to you both. You summon Google and ask it, where's the best place for us to meet, she's vegetarian". You can request an answer to a question like "Did Angelina Jolie really bungee jump yesterday?" and get a response such as "Yes she did. She jumped off a bridge in New Zealand".

I look forward to summoning Google and saying "Remember when I was writing that paper for that conference? There was a quote by x about y in it, what was it?"..."That's right, who else said something about that?"...

Google becomes a backend system. Gasp! No but there is nothing more natural than for the engine to be in the background. I think that conversational systems removed from search are fun toys, but their real use is in information retrieval. Once you start getting used to having all your information at your fingertips as and when you ask, you are also going to get used to conversing with the system pretty quickly.

For this kind of thing of thing to work you will need strong summarization systems, natural language generation and understanding, and machine translation, personalization, machine learning also, not to mention all the other supporting technologies without which it could never happen. Luckily these are all under development right now.

One of the most interesting questions I believe is "Does your behaviour change now that the search engine is conversational in nature?" - Does it become your friend, do you get attached to it because it shows human qualities, or do you treat it like a tool? Does the way that you search change now that you no longer actually go to a search engine web page? Are you more focused, more specific, more vague?

Hummmm....so how are businesses going to take advantage of the search market then? Clearly ads are still going to be served up, but how do you make sure the clever agent like your content most of all?

Google discuss the more immediate future of search here.

November 25, 2008

SearchWiki according to me

I don't usually post about already well covered news, but in the case of the Google SearchWiki I will make a small exception. Search Wiki allows you to manipulate the search engine results and leave comments for others about a result.

There is an awful lot more information on the actual Google blog, Danny Sullivan wrote a nice guide as well, and there's a Q&A with Google about it as well.

I've asked around and most general users don't seem to have even noticed it was there. My mum definitely has no idea what the whole thing is about, because she doesn't want to break anything, she isn't going to press on any of the buttons. The more savvy users right down to the programmers said they weren't bothered with it either.

I keep forgetting its there and so I haven't used it very much. I think that we would all begin to use it if we started to see the benefit. Sadly in order to see the benefit, you have to start using it!

Google said “It’s a new way to empower users. You can remember answers to repeat queries. It lets you add your personal touch to our algorithms” (See the Q&A doc).

I genuinely think it is indeed a tool to help you alter the results to suit your particular slant on a particular query. I also think it's a pretty cool way to collect a huge amount of user data and also human edited results provide more information on the authority of the resource.

Remember how we look at Social Media sites like Digg and said that the voting was warped because of it being so easy to manipulate? Well seeing this is in a "closed" environment, meaning that nobody else but you gets to see it, there is no reason to manipulate the results. Also the issue with the weighting of each vote is also no issue because it's proper to a single user.

1-800-GOOG-411 was all about collecting phonemes to feed into a machine to make voice search possible today. I think SearchWiki is along the same lines.

November 24, 2008

Evri: content recommendation

For the past week you may have noticed a little Evri button at the bottom of my posts. If you click on it, you'll get a pop up window displaying related news, videos, topics and a visual of how this topic ties into others. You can drill down from there and explore more content.

This cool little tool is created by a team consisting of NLPers, AI aces, and the CEO is Neil Roseman (former VP of technology at Amazon). The idea is to allow content to network and help you discover new connections in your semantic ride.

"Evri's technology automates connections between Web content by applying a more human-like understanding of the words on the page. We think that there is a big opportunity to help website publishers better engage their readers and help readers discover compelling content in a new and addictive way."

It doesn't use keywords, popularity or anything other than each element available (place, person, article...) and how to connects to others. Evri grabs content from highly rated resources and is constantly working to increase it's knowledge base and building a nice data graph of the web at the same time.

I like it :)

The fact that you never actually type a query to get information is a trend I see continuing waaaay into the future. There will be a time when there is no need to visit a search engine as all of your information will be available to you in whichever environment you happen to be in (word doc, excel, programming IDE, game...). Personalisation supports these applications, imagine how much a system can learn from you in 5 years of working with you.

So we'll be needing a fair few more of you to join the ranks in A.I please, and bring your HCI friends too.

November 23, 2008

10 free NLP tools for the SEO

Here is a list of 10 seriously sound NLP tools that I've used or still use both for SEO and other things. I won't tell you what to do with them, I'm sure you'll find a use for the tool if you like it :)

FreeLing - it's a package for language analysis containing amongst other things sentence splitters, pos-taggers, morphological analysis, flexible multiword recognition, named entity detection...

Assert - it's for semantic role tagging. It annotates naturally occurring text with semantic arguments.

LingPipe - Java libraries for linguistic analysis. It uncovers relationships within your text, and classifies text passages by language, character encoding, genre, topic, or sentiment and it can also cluster documents into sets.