‘Search Engine Results’ 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: How does Google decide what is suitable for general audience viewing. The opposite problem is also encountered, how do images that are not linked with adult subjects make it into the Google images only when safe-search is turned off? Matt Cutts worked on Safesearch. It is an algorithmic process. From the Google blog: Google’s filter uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories. It is likely that factors used in SafeSearch would also be useful in determining what is defined to be an explicit image? Despite the advances…

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Excerpt: Social media is a popularity contest. A study of UTube and Digg has shown that the popularity of a post or video depends on the number of votes it get early on in its life. This should come as no surprise to anyone that uses Sphinn. Articles gain importance from the number of Sphinn they can achieve.  On Sphinn I can see there are two reasons for this: i) A variation on the filthy-linking-rich theory – that posts with Sphinns find it much easier to get Sphinns. These sites will be ranked higher and receive greater exposure giving them more opportunity…

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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: While carrying out a search using Yahoo, I noticed that Yahoo supports advanced query modification in a similar way that Google does. With some trial and error I have discovered the following operators seem to work: intext:query – finds the search query text within a document. anchor:query – finds the search term within the URL of the document. intitle:query – finds the search term within the title of the document. site:query – send you to the yahoo site explorer where you can find links and pages indexed by Yahoo. I could not find any documentation for these operators, but it could be a feauture that…