‘Search Engines’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: Introduction The searches that bring up your web site are such that the distributions of queries is made up of a few common queries (hopefully your chosen keywords)  and many more so called long-tail searches.  Long-tail search queries are very specific queries that may only occur once however, the total number of these individual queries is such that they form the bulk of the total search. You will often hear about the 80/20 rule, i.e. 20% of the total number of search queries will be made up of the most common key phrases with the remaining 80% given to the long-tail. Modelling…

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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: On 31st December, Matt Cutts confirmed the latest update to toolbar  PageRank. SEO the Game has gone up to a PR-4 from PR-0, however, this is only for the first page. While we are very pleased at the rapid rise in toolbar PR, it is a very poor metric for the importance of a page and now seems a good time to go over common questions people often ask about this misunderstood number. The Toolbar Meter For those that have never seen the toolbar PR meter, it used to be displayed in Google search results as a green bar which can take values…

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Excerpt: Looking for results in Google books I notice that they now displaying scanned copies of magazines. This is great stuff. Magazines included at the moment include Popular  Mechanics which go back as far as the 1905. Other magazines scanned so far are an eclectic mix including: Popular Science Ebony New York Magazine Jet Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Runners World The Alcalde Back packer There are probably many more different magazines that have been scanned by now. An option in the advance search allows you to choose only to return results from magazines. It is especially interesting to look back at magazines of the 1960s and see what products were being…

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Excerpt: Introduction How can a search engine determine whether two documents are similar? In our post on search engine operation we looked at how search engines can retrieve information on documents given a query string. Vector methods are also used to decide whether documents are related. Example Let’s make this a concrete example. Say we have three toy documents which have been parsed into their keywords so that all the unimportant word have been removed. For example, commonly occurring words such as: as, of, the, … and so on are removed. We might be left with: document 1 = {news, information, campaign, raise, awareness} document 2…