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.
Abhinav Bindra The Shooting Star August 12, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, News, Olympics, Sports.Tags: Abhinav Bindra, India, Olympics, Shooting
1 comment so far
It can happen only in India, nowhere else in the world you can get 80% of the prime time of all news channel and media after winning one gold medal in the Olympics. Then, it is only India with its well over one billion population which has never won a solo gold medal the Olympics.
I have been watching how the bloggers and the media have taken to it, it is just crazy. I love the frenzy India’s gets into. It looks as if we all have nothing to do and we suddenly find an occupation 
I got seven congratulatory SMS as a chain mail, at-least 20 people broke the news to me, and I was asked thrice whether I have posted a blog. Not bad in an otherwise action packed day, with no time to breathe.
We also have another Indian greatness, we all instantly get into “I knew that” and “I had predicted that” mode, today’s newspapers are full with these and other such reactions.
Abhinav Bindra Wins Gold August 11, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, India, News, News Reaction, Olympics, Punjabis, Sports.Tags: Abhinav Bindra, Beijing Olympics, Bindra Wins, India, India Olympic, Indian Blog Writer, Olympic Gold Medals, Olympics, Shooting, Simarprit, Sports
2 comments
Thank you Abhinav Bindra, you’ve broken the national record of India, of not winning an Olympic Gold in individualcategory since inception of Olympics. Abhinav Bindra wins gold is a news worth its weight in gold.
Twenty eight years is more than a generation, may be one and a half generation of going gold less in Olympics, somehow as a nation we have come to terms with the fact that “our focus is somewhere else”. Hockey use to be our only hope which got us all the Gold Medals we won at the Olympics till date. It is ironical that these are the first Olympic Games when India is not participating in Hockey as we failed to qualify for the same. So as a nation Abhinav Bindra has done us a big favor of making it less humiliating and making those of us who are still hooked on to Olympics 2008 see reason for the same.
If Abhinav Bindra can do it so can many others. Last Olympics it was Major Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore who won silver for us in Shooting in the Athens Olympics in 2004, so from Silver in shooting event to Gold medal we have moved ahead. With one Gold Medal in our kitty we are at-least sure that we would not be making the bottom of the medal tally for Beijing Olympics 2008. If we get one or two more medals we may make it to the Top 50 Sporting Nations. The second most populous nation in the world seeing it as an achievement to be in top 50 Sporting Nations of the world is a realistic statement on India’s Sporting focus. For us, as a nation, sports begin with cricket and end with cricket, and even in that we’ve not won a world cup for last 25 years.
News read at http://www.headlinesindia.com/olympics-news/beijing/abhinav-wins-indias-first-gold-247.html
More to come…
Is Google Down? August 9, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, Internet, News, News Reaction, portals, Search Engines.Tags: Google, Google down, Indian Blog Writer, News, News Reaction, News Update, Simarprit
6 comments
I noticed at 4:40 Pacific that Google.com is not working. GMAIL was also not working but Google.co.in was working and so was Google.ie
It took me about 10 minutes to conclude that Google.com was indeed down, atleast for me.
If Google can go down like this - Oh my God!
There must be a vulnerability, there is so much of technology available. Am I the only person who is not able to use Google.com?
Google.com for me went down after 4:30 Pacific and came back before 5:20 Pacific. I am right now in India and accessing from there.
Maybe Google.com was not down and it was a DNS glitch?
Please inform, if you faced n problems?
Cuil – Review July 30, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, Internet, News, News Reaction, portals, Review.Tags: Cuil, cuil search engine, cuil-search, Google Cuil, News, Review, Search Engine, Simarprit
8 comments
Google – Cuil Comparison
Is it really Cool?
Yes, the interface is. It is too good.
I will work towards a detailed comparison of Google and Cuil, let us see what comes out.
As a starter, Cuil is to Search Engines what iPhone was to mobile devices (at least the interface). It is awesome. The interface and HCI angle is a killer. It can disrupt the party for Google. It has that in it. That’s the good news. On HCI they get 10/10, compared to Google’s 2/10. But on search terms, I am afraid the novelty doesn’t pay, they are just continents away, or shall I say halfway around the world.
I just did about 2300 searches. Random. Global. On any thing and everything. I am getting more focused as I move on with more parameters.
- As per Cuil there are no “Indian Restaurants in San Jose” though we have “Japanese Restaurants in San Jose”, “Mexican Restaurants in San Jose” and “Chinese Restaurants in San Jose”. LoL
- Search for Map and see the error
- Search for Sap and see the error
| Parameter | Cuil | |
| Absolute Search | 9 | 1 |
| Addresses | 8 | 3 |
| Adjacency Checks | 9 | 1 |
| Adult Filter | 6 | 2 |
| Anti Domain Squatting | 8 | 2 |
| Blog Search | 8 | 2 |
| Brand | 10 | 2 |
| Bridge Page Filters | 8 | 2 |
| Bug Free | 9 | 2 |
| Buzz | 7 | 7 |
| City Names | 8 | 6 |
| Cloaking Check | 8 | 4 |
| Complex Search | 7 | 3 |
| Crawls | 9 | 6 |
| Customized Search | 7 | 2 |
| Database | 9 | 7 |
| Date and Time | 7 | 1 |
| Date Filter | 8 | 4 |
| Dead Link Checks | 7 | 2 |
| Deep Search | 9 | 3 |
| Default Weightage | 7 | 1 |
| Depth | 9 | 7 |
| Dictionary Results | 9 | 3 |
| Directory Structure | 9 | 3 |
| Domain Name | 8 | 6 |
| Dynamic Content Handling | 8 | 6 |
| Fake Listings | 7 | 6 |
| Four Words | 10 | 1 |
| Frame Based Content | 8 | 4 |
| Gateway Filters | 7 | 3 |
| Geo Filter | 9 | 6 |
| H Tagging Relevancy | 6 | 3 |
| Image Embedding | 6 | 1 |
| Image Mapping | 7 | 2 |
| Image Relevance | 9 | 1 |
| Incremental Updates | 8 | 0 |
| Industry Awareness | 10 | 5 |
| Keyword Stuffing | 6 | 7 |
| Keyword Weightage | 8 | 5 |
| Languages | 9 | 1 |
| Links | 8 | 3 |
| Long Tail Words | 9 | 2 |
| Look & Feel | 1 | 10 |
| Mathematical Modeling | 9 | 6 |
| Matrix Approach | 9 | 9 |
| Mature | 10 | 1 |
| Medical Terms | 8 | 4 |
| Meta Tags | 7 | 5 |
| Popularity Weightage | 8 | 3 |
| Proper Noun Search | 8 | 2 |
| Random Numbers | 7 | 2 |
| Reach | 10 | 2 |
| Read My Mind | 9 | 0 |
| Relational | 9 | 4 |
| Relevancy | 7 | 2 |
| Relevancy Correction | 8 | 2 |
| Safe Search | 6 | 2 |
| Search Assist | 3 | 9 |
| SEO Filters | 7 | 2 |
| Single Word | 6 | 2 |
| Site Map Relevancy | 8 | 3 |
| Smart | 2 | 10 |
| Social Networking Content | 8 | 2 |
| Speed | 10 | 9 |
| Spelling Correction | 8 | 2 |
| Stop Words | 8 | 2 |
| Subdomain Handling | 8 | 6 |
| Tags | 8 | 7 |
| Telephone Number Search | 9 | 3 |
| Three Words | 9 | 2 |
| Title | 7 | 2 |
| TLD Filter | 7 | 1 |
| Two Words | 7 | 4 |
| UGC Indexing | 7 | 4 |
| Video Embedding | 5 | 1 |
| Weighted Average | 9 | 4 |
| Wikipedia Results | 9 | 3 |
| Within top results | 7 | 8 |
| ZIP Code Search | 9 | 4 |
Notes:
- I am still working on this post, this post is continuously changing.
- New Parameters are being added every day
- Scores are also changing – I plan to do a major update
- This is a self initiated review
- I make no claims to be an authority on this subject or methodology adopted. However I admit to be a part of the vision/ engineering/ architecture/ design and development team of a Search Engine project which worked well as a beta product, but couldn’t find financial backing and died a natural death.
Ahmedabad Blasts Update July 27, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, City, India, Is anyone listening, News, News Reaction.Tags: Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad Blasts, Bomb Blasts, Gujarat, India, Indian Blog Writer, News Update, Simarprit
1 comment so far
I avoid writing twice on a news, but this one is disturbing me a lot. It is 3:30 AM in San Jose and the restless me is trying to get hold of the actual number of deaths in the Ahmedabad blasts, 40 to 50 is the range which most of the sites are now talking about.
What are the calculations, the masterminds amongst the terrorists would be doing, 3 per blast is good or bad for them. Numbers matter to all, and more over to those who are in the business of fear. I am sure they would have planned and hoped for 100 per blast, yes hoped. Reading across Guardian, CNN, NDTV, Headlines India, Times of India and BBC one just gets one feeling, media would move on, the Government would move on, the terror merchants and there terror network would move on, even the relatives of those who have died would move on, but these 40 -50 lesser mortals would never move again.
No one is talking about Bangalore blasts today, 48 hours is what it took for everyone to move on, a search on Google for both Bangalore Blasts Suspects and Ahmedabad Blasts Suspects, got an unexpected first result – http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGIH_enIN234IN234&q=Ahmedabad+Blast+Suspects - Al Jazeera. Yes Al Jazeera network’s english website. No CNN, no BBC, no Times of India, no NDTV. Ruthlessness of the conspirators is demonstrated amply by the fact that they planted bombs near/ inside the hospitals – objective can be nothing but if you survived so far, die now.
Ahmedabad blasts have something more in them, they bring back unpleasent memories of series of communal violence incidents which have been happening in Ahmedabad and other areas of Gujarat for about a decade now. Gujarat has suffered, it was coming up very well and would have beome number one on per capita income in India in these last ten years. Every blast takes it back, demotivates some, cautions others, investment climate does suffer.
India as a nation needs to practice zero tolerance when it comes to such acts, we need political will and quick execution. I am sure our police would know the sympathizers if not the accused very well. Just lock them up and hang couple of them after every incident. On the other hand, work towards economic integration of both the communities, economic ties can sometime be thicker than religion.
Thank Usha for a more balanced update: http://blogs.mapsofindia.com/2008/07/27/ahmedabad-blasts-update/
An Indian Blog Writer July 6, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging.Tags: Indian Blog Writer, Simarprit
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I would love to trade in my designation of CEO Compare Infobase for the designation of an Indian Blog Writer. Am I joking, your guess could be as good as mine. Over 50 posts and several comments and counter comments later, Simarprit is an Indian Blog Writer as in, an Indian who writes blogs and not a blog writer who writes on India. My posts have no pattern, my blog is more of a potpourri, and there are no boundaries, geographic or otherwise. I just write, what I feel like, when I feel like, how much I feel like. Many a times I come back to add more to the same post, sometime I just don’t read them again, I must confess writing a post relaxes me. My father’s numerous attempts to make me write a daily diary see a partial success in my this blog.
If I trade in my designation: Won’t this become a profession? Won’t I need something else to relax with? Would I start writing on the basis of search data and statistics? Won’t my posts be profit motivated? Would I become a Commercial Indian Blog Writer? Would I loose my freedom to write? I think my answer to all of these is Yes. An emphatic yes.
I never ever had a hobby which I could pursue for more than few days. Writing posts is becoming my hobby. I would love it to be just that, it should not become a compulsion, a passion or an obsession. I would love to be a free tow write, uncatagorized blogger. Simarprit’s web log should be a place to just read sundry and general posts, posts which just happened were never planned. I started my career as an editor of ISCAP an in-house publication of NIIT. The pleasure of writing a signed editorial became a job after first few issues, ith this post it has not happened like that. I see blogging as an extension of my life. I just can’t call up my friends and colleagues and say hey listen to me? This post has become a medium for me to write and casually let them know that I have some thoughts online. Many go and read and many don’t, it is just fine with me, I get the pleasure that I have communicated and expressed my point of view. When I use to talk I was never certain whether the other person has listened/ heard or understood what I meant.
Writing post to me is me, and I would love to do it as often as I can and as freely I can. I can see my posts becoming more casual and candid, I am glad and would like it to remain that way. While reading many other Indian Blog Writers, I has seen a conscious projection of ones own profile, many a times in contrast to what they really are. To me that is not blogging, that is business. I also cover Compare Infobase and its business interests in my posts, I do it due to personal reasons as the content or event behind those posts concerned Simarprit as a person.
