Tim Converse (an ex-Yahoo employee, for those of you asleep at the back) has moved to the much-heralded Powerset search start-up. Powersets’ “thing” is that they are working towards “natural language processing”. For those of you who’ve been under a rock for the last decade, the concept is that you try to extract the meaning from a query, rather than just treating it as a concatenation of term vectors.
At the simplest level, it’s recognising that some queries are informational, others are commercial and yet others may not really fit into either category well. When applied to web search, there’s also the requirement to use the sematic data to work out what kinds of answers would be appropriate. Tim has a thought-provoking post about proximity and it’s uses and limitations, “Proximity is a hack“. I’ll let you read it youself, as it is quite long, but it’s well worth it.
(more…)
In an interesting object lesson in SE evolution, I’ve watched the SERP for the term “negative SEO” mutate greatly over the last few days. I was a comfortable #1, but with a few “power domains” picking up on the term, and referencing the Forbes article, I have been pushed back to #6 (as I see it at time of writing). The interlopers are :
Forbes.com (not unexpected, really)
Philipp Lenssen (a search A-lister)
Dannys’ place (another search A-lister)
John Andrews (John’s a curious one for me. Sometimes I agree with him, and we are right in step. Sometimes I think he’s dead wrong, and wonder how the hell he survives online. I suspect that he’s an embittered cynic, and remember “cynic is just a word used by idealists to describe realists”, who TRIES to believe, so hard. Kind of an online lapsed Catholic)
Andy Beal (actually a contributed piece bylined to Jordan McCollum) (I gather Ms McCollum rather disapproves of the whole thing 
)
(more…)
Andy Greenberg of Forbes.com has written a new article, entitled “The Saboteurs of Search“, quoting myself, Jason Duke and Matt Cutts. It’s quite a good piece (and not JUST because I contributed 
) which does a pretty good job of saying what can be said about a seldom-discussed topic : negative SEO.
(more…)
