SES 2008 San Jose August 18, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Bay Area, Blogging, Internet, Marketing, Search Engines.Tags: Advertising, Long Tail Search, Online, Search Engines, SES, SES 2008
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For all my posts on SES 2008: http://simarprit.wordpress.com/category/ses-2008/
Long Tail of Search & Semantic Search
It is my first time at Search Engine Strategies 2008 – San Jose, California (SES 2008, San Jose), two sessions down and currently attending the panel discussion here are my early thoughts on what’s going on:
Random Gyan:
Long Tail of Search
- Long tail can count to about 30% of the organic search
- Use blogs to harvest long tail traffic
- Use local long tail terms in local listings
- Use attributes in Google Maps
- Look for the “very Long Tail” and not just the long tail
- Weigh your advertising options
- Smaller Niche sites maybe a cheaper option, and may give great results at fraction of cost
- Links with navigation can help
- SEO’s have a role in online search market
- Mind your Traffic vs. Bounce rate
- Three phrases per page maybe the most optimum and effective targeting
- Live out of logs, they hold he key
- Shoot upto 20 “me too”: terms per key phrase
- Make sure your pages get indexed, search engines are busy, they may miss you.
- Divide your site into Key Phrase Zones
- SEO is no longer dead, it is making a comeback, and a big comeback
- PPC is becoming expensive
- Understand your Page Yield
- Account for your bottom 100 pages, analyzing them may help
- Attack your freeloaders
- Plan your SEO Dashboard, ensure it has everything you need, right under your mouse
- Measurement is critical, Measure visitors per page
- Know the lifetime value of your customers
- Search friendly URLs are important, but there is also life beyond them.
- Use “No Follow” effectively to increase your page rank
- Slicing and Dicing the content is critical
- Ideal length of the URL is a very subjective thought
- Anchors within the documents help
- Rate your keywords and assess your value
- Optimize Pagination
- Re-look at your internal linking structure
- Surrogate sites can help
- Getting high value back-links remains critical
Semantic Search:
- Let us talk to search engine and forget abstract codes and mono syllables
- Semantic Search engines attempt to understand underlying structured data
- Semantic search engines tend to eliminate ambiguous queries
- Search monkey project by Yahoo is an attempt to open up Yahoo Search platform for further development, based on semantic qualities and natural language expressions.
- Boorah claims that semantic search is happening. A quick 20 word analysis revealed little and exposed lots of limitations to the project.
- Google is implementing high degree of behind the scene semantics
- Hakia is a full blown version of Semantic Search (Beta), some of the attempts looked to be right, results are coincidentally close to Yahoo
- Powerset claims to have extreme semantic capabilities, which were not visible when I gave a set of questions to the website
- Ask.com claims to be amongst the best semantic search engines around with best results in Natural Language Query processing
- Generalization Vs. Specialization, Parallelization, Question Type, Categorization, Compressions, Content Characterization, ontology science applications are amongst some of the terms introduced.
- Inside the page semantic results could be another deliverable.
- Semantic Search has a lot to do with Aggregation of facts
- Improving relevance would remain a challenge
- Linguistic capabilities aided in ample measure with AI can deliver a great product over couple of years.
Hi Simar,
I wanted to post this comment earlier, but wanted to confirm a few things.
A month or two back, one of my friends who is pursuing his post graduate studies in Theoretical Mathematics explained to me an interesting concept of vagueness and completeness. After reading your post, it seems that Semantic Search is in some ways connected to the “Logic of Vagueness”.
Vagueness is something that human beings understand, but we haven’t been able to incorporate that ability into machines.
Without going too much into the mathematical details of the Logic of Vagueness, i’ll just speak about how it’s related to Semantic Search.
If you type “Gandhi’s assassin” into Google, the first result thrown up is a Rediff article; when ideally the Wikipedia page on Nathuram Godse could have come up at the top.
Currently, all search engines follow a statistical method of throwing up relevant URLs, wherein the URL that has used the keyword “Gandhi’s assassin”, the maximum or optimum number of times, occupies the first position in the search engine results.
According to the Logic of Vagueness, a human being will understand from the query, “Gandhi’s assassin”, that information about Nathuram Godse is being sought. A human being will then proceed to provide all information about Nathuram Godse.
If and when Semantic Search becomes a reality, a search engine would be endowed with the capacity to understand that when a person uses the keyword, “Gandhi’s assassin”, he or she is actually looking for information on Nathuram Godse. The search engines would then probably show the page on Wikipedia as the first result for the keyword.
I have taken up a lot of space, sorry about that…But a lot still remains to be said about this topic. Maybe some other time…