In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, customer happiness is an end in itself, and will be pursued with greater interest, passion, and empathy than the profit-centered business is capable of. – Putting Customers Ahead of Investors, John Mackey, founder and CEO of […]
The Web is getting more social, and the internet allows conversations between consumers and those who sell goods and services online on a scale that can be global in reach. The nature of that conversation has changed from the days of mass media to now, and success in business on the Web may rely more […]
A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether or not a web site had a privacy policy. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected about visitors might be used? Probably […]
Starting out with my first website in 1996, I hadn’t realized that one of the most important pages that I had put on the site was a contact page. With a copy of “Learn HTML in 2 Weeks” at my side and a design that reflected my limited skills, I wasn’t aware of my limitations, […]
Sipping on a cup of coffee on a Wednesday morning in the lounge of the local bowling alley last summer, surrounded by shop keepers and insurance salesmen and other small business owners, I hand out my business card. Most of these merchants have actual places I can visit, while all I have are pages they […]
Robots reading cereal boxes in the supermarket? Googlebot at the art museum? Street signs and building addresses snatched from Street View images for local search, image search, and product search? Three new patent applications published at the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office this week explore the intricacies of reading text in images taken from Google’s […]
As a small business owner, the web holds a lot of challenges that, if navigated successfully, may yield some treasures. But there are some waves on the horizon, and uncharted waters ahead for many who would pursue those riches. A secret for those of you who are starting out with a fresh website, and something […]
One of the key elements of how the Google search engine works involves the use of the words, or anchor text, that appear in a link on a source page, to describe a page targeted by the link. We know this from statements about anchor text made in documents like the Lawrence Page and Sergey […]
There are opportunities that small businesses have that large businesses might not even considering touching, or that they may not have the ability to respond to quickly enough. The aerospace industry uses the term “launch window” to describe the right combination of time and location for a rocket to be launched so that it will […]
More and more small businesses are starting blogs on the Web, and it’s a positive development, if done correctly. One of the benefits is the chance for business owners to hold a conversation with potential clients, and with people who may be interested the services, or goods that the company offers as well as with […]
Until very recently, you might have seen a label next to a search result in Google that indicated it was a “supplemental” result. A couple of patents from Google, one of which was granted this week and one from earlier this year, discuss how a search query might return results from an extended database that […]
There’s a kind of page that shows up on websites that I think of as everyday pages. These are commonly appearing pages that you might see on almost every website, such as the “contact” page, the “about us,” the “terms of service” and the “privacy policy.” These are pages that I see small business sites […]
There’s a fallacy that sellers create for themselves, that most people go online to spend money. — Ammon Johns, from How Many Search Queries Are Really Unique?, I checked the AOL database :-) You research a niche for a business online, and find a genuine need in an area that larger businesses aren’t filling. You […]
The Web reaches out to embrace businesses online, even if the owners of those businesses hesitate at the attempt. There are many that haven’t taken the step of placing themselves on the internet, and yet they are there, even without a Web site. They may appear in business directories, with name and address and phone […]
Back in March, Christine Churchill wrote a Small is Beautiful column about the ability of small businesses to be flexible and creative, to think locally and explore niche markets that larger companies wouldn’t enter because they were too large or too slow to change in Survival of the Nimble. When your company is run by […]
One of the biggest stirs of 2005 in the search marketing field was caused by the release of a patent application from Google titled Information retrieval based on historical data. It introduced time as a dimension of ranking pages, with changes in content and linking and advertising and topics as factors to be considered, as […]
The Third International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web will be held next month, and there’s an impressive scope and depth to the topics that will be discussed based upon the papers to be presented during the conference, and the members of the committees who have worked to put this workshop together. This […]
In the online world, we’ve seen the emergence of social networking sites that allow for the discovery and sharing of websites, of bookmarks, of common interests, and the meeting of friends and friends of friends. In the business world offline, small businesses have the opportunity to be socially active in a number of ways, from […]
A new paper from Microsoft Research, Web Object Retrieval (pdf), discusses an approach towards Web indexing that changes focus from page level, to that of indexing objects found upon pages. OK, so that does that mean? It’s easiest to show you first, rather than tell you…
Is there a Google Phone waiting to be released, or just mobile software that makes it easier for people to use Google to search with? How serious is Google about mobile search? How would such a system work? I ran into a patent application on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) pages from Google that […]
Groucho is not my real name. I’m breaking it in for a friend. – Groucho Marx One of the most important and one of the most difficult decisions that a business can make is what to call themselves. A friend managed to put together a business model in few days. The same friend struggled for […]
One of the difficulties of talking about local search is the lack of a shared vocabulary. I’ve been working on putting together a Google Local Search Glossary, focusing upon some of the terminology from patent applications published by Google. The Glossary is a work in progress, and will likely evolve some over the next few […]
If you bid on keywords for a term or phrase that you rank well for in a search engine, might your organic result be filtered in some instances, when your ad appears on the same page? A newly granted Microsoft patent is the first I recall seeing which discusses such a possible interaction based upon […]
Back in October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that came […]
Google returns results based upon content appearing upon individual pages, or at specific URLs. But that content could come from different authors, who have different levels of control over it. For example, a blog page may have posts written by more than one author, comments penned by others, and advertisements showing ads that even the […]
One of my favorite search related articles is one that Danny wrote a few years back titled Searching With Invisible Tabs. It stands out because it describes one of the major difficulties involving how search engines work – making a user interface as simple as possible, while still somehow providing information that can meet a […]
Clickz columnist Ryan Naraine wrote up some of his thoughts about a Google patent application (Allocating advertising space in a network of displays) that would enable advertising upon electronic displays and billboards in shopping centers and other places, in his article Google Patent Filing Hints at Digital Billboard Ad Network. While New Scientist wrote about […]
A wide range of newly published patent applications and granted patents, covering such ground as subscribed content in search results from Google; tag searching, detecting similar audio files, and simpler support vector machines from Yahoo; geographic based searching from MetaCarta; and data center architecture and smarter results to queries from Microsoft, amongst others…
A newly published patent application from Yahoo, Using community annotations as anchortext, provides a hint at some of the research and work that Yahoo is doing to incorporate user created tags, annotations, bookmarks, and social profiles into the way that they index and organize information, and rank that information. Danny asked me if I would […]
Desktop and file search can be very different than web search, and the user’s context plays an important role in what is valuable when creating a search algorithm. But understanding context may be helpful to web search, too. Microsoft’s Susan Dumais has done an extensive amount of research on how users interact with search applications […]
Have you ever tagged an image in Flickr, a link in Del.icio.us, a video in YouTube? Have you used tags in these systems to find similar pictures or pages or videos? Is tagging is taking indexing away from professional indexers, and putting it into the hands of amateurs. Have you used a tag to indicate […]
Google was granted new patents this week on a methods for estimating similarity between web pages and documents which may help to filter duplicate content, and upon a digital mapping system which appears to be the foundation for Google Maps, and has a number of related map-based patent applications in its wake.
Can indexing phrases from pages be an effective approach in identifying and filtering keyword stuffed pages, and honeypot pages aimed at attracting visitors solely to have them click upon ads? A new patent application published yesterday and assigned to Google, Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system, presents a reasonable argument in […]
Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a […]
Back in September, Vanessa Fox at the Official Google Blog shared with us a little information about sitelinks, the groups of links to internal pages that sometimes appear under the top result on a search results page. She also pointed to a page on Google’s Webmaster Help Center that provides some more details. A patent […]
Some processes covered in patents granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Microsoft reranking results based upon redundancy of information, Ask reranking pages based upon affinities between searchers, Hewlett-Packard creating queries for searchers to investigate from scanned documents, and; Exalead forming dynamic query refinements from words found in documents located within search […]
What are people looking for when they type “Google” into Google? What do they want to see when they use “eBay” as a query? How does a Google or Yahoo learn from their log files, and other user information? What does it tell them about user intent? In an interview posted earlier today with Luke […]
The final day of the conference saw blog posts about the conference’s last three sets of sessions; some video interviews conducted by Lee Odden with Neil Patel and Cameron Olthius, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg, Stephan Spencer, Gord Hotchkiss; and a retrospective of Day three, from the comforts of home, by Kim Krause Berg. The […]
The social side of search came out in some of the blog posts about Chicago SES today. Search Pulse 11, broadcast live last night during cocktail hour was filled with major search issues and special on air guests. Loren at Search Engine journal writes of Jim Hedger’s press conference last night, which uncovered a connection […]
Three new search related patents were granted yesterday at the US Patent and Trademark Office to Yahoo, Google, and IBM. The Yahoo Patent looks at how to measure the buzz around categories, topics, and terms from their use at the Yahoo Portal. Google’s filing focuses upon matching anchor text to find related documents in different […]