‘Algorithms’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: The success of a search engine algorithm lies in its ability to retrieving information for a given query. There are two ways in which one might consider the return of results to be successful. Either you can obtain very accurate results or you can find many results which have some connection with the search query. In information retrieval, these are termed precision and recall, respectively. The precision is defined as the fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant. Recall is defined as the fraction of relevant documents that are retrieved.This might seem like the distinction between the Judian People’s Front and…

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Excerpt: Cloaking is the practice of showing a different web page to search engine bots than to your visitors in an attempt to distort rankings. The hope on the part of the cloaker is that the search engine can be shown a rich variety of content which contains the keywords they would like to be ranked for. For example a flash site that sends textual content to the search engines. This is practice is considered to be black-hat and if detected would lead to search engine retribution. So how do the search engines detect cloaked websites? When a search engine indexes…

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Excerpt: Niels Bohr said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” I feel that this also applies to the field of search engine optimisation also. It is not an exact science. At best, it can be compared to economics or sociology. Data is noisy, there are lots of theories and everyone has their own opinion. It may be worse, since unlike economics or sociology, how search engines work can be changed without notice. While you cannot argue with results, there are many roads to Mecca. So how…

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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…