‘Algorithms’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: If you’re bored with eating left-over turkey sandwiches and are fed-up watching sentimental programmes on how wonderful it is at Christmas then something which might be a bit more interesting is the  MIT video lectures which are available online. Currently, I am engrossed in the Introduction to Algorithms course which delves into the inner workings of sorting routines and searching routines and their mathematical analysis. For example, did you know that it is impossible to make a sorting algorithm using comparisions which can run better than n log n time? There are many other courses with video lectures so there is something for…

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Excerpt: Introduction While looking at a cool program that uses a genetic algorithm to design a car that drives over bumpy terrain I started to think about genetic algorithms and whether it would be possible to create an SEO genetic algorithm. How Genetic Algorithms Work For those of you who are not familiar with genetic algorithms they are process by which  a complex task can be found by using a process of selection over many generations. Initially a set of random numbers is chosen to form a gene. Each of the numbers in the gene represents an aspect of  a possible solution. To take the…

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Excerpt: Introduction The PageRank algorithm is a global ranking metric used to determine the overall quality of a page. The Hilltop algorithm determines the quality of a result based on the relevance to the query term. The original paper is available. The algorithm overcomes problems with broad search terms which return large sets of documents that have to be ranked by checking them against expert sites are derived from the terms in the query. An expert site is be one which has many one-way links to other expert sites. Affiliated sites are discounted. (Sites are deemed affiliated if they share the…

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Excerpt: Introduction If you are serious about SEO, then it is important to know how different search engine algorithms work. In this post we look at the Hypertext-Induced Topic Selection (HITS) invented by Jon Kleinburg, 1998 [1]. It also goes under the name of the CLEVER (Clientside EigenVector Enhanced Retrieval) algorithm as implemented in a prototype IBM search engine. It is thought that search engine Teoma,  latter acquired by Ask, used a method based on the HITs algorithm. HITS is query dependent and calculated at the time of the search. Pages are given two scores, a hub-score which refers to the number of…

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Excerpt: TrustRank Algorithm TrustRank is an algorithm that was published in 2004 as a way of combating spam sites from achieving higher rankings than they deserve. It does this using the assumption that good websites rarely link to bad ones. For it to work it needs an initial selection of good website which are determined by humans and the level of trust is damped as the distance between links from the good site increases. Given that a patent has been filed it is possible that Yahoo have applied the algorithm to their search engine technology. However the idea that Google has a similar TrustRank…