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Friday, March 16th, 2012
Search engine giant Google is set to tweak its algorithm to improve its semantic search results.
Google is hoping to make its results more informative and useful for mobile users, and those using voice recognition technology.
Amit Singhal, from Google, revealed that upcoming algorithm changes will focus on semantic search tweaks.
Industry experts have postulated that Google’s focus on semantic search ties to the launch of the Google Assistant – which will allow Android users to make voice-activated search queries, much like Apple’s Siri feature.
Google has already introduced some semantic results: if a user asks “How tall is the London Eye?” the top result answers the question with “Best guess for London Eye height is 135 metres” – using aggregated information from trusted sources like Wikipedia.
Type “weather”, and the first result will show the latest forecasts.
The move is particularly useful for mobile web users, as it provides instantaneous answers without the need to trawl through websites. For queries on-the-go, semantic makes the search process smoother and more refined. For voice queries, it ensures a useful result is returned.
Google has led the way for search algorithm – constantly tweaking its site to return more relevant, higher quality and specific results. Its search technology already knows to look for synonyms (motor and auto, for instance) – but semantic will take this a step further: by essentially guessing why the user has made a specific search query.
By analysing billions of daily searches, Google is building a “Knowledge Graph”: a database with some 200 million entries that will help to track how searchers use results data, so the results can be made more relevant.
Of course, it will be some time before the technology becomes smart enough to react to queries like a human might – but these changes will certainly make mobile internet navigation more simple.
By displaying direct answers internally, instead of returning external pages, Google is, however, essentially positioning itself as a one-stop Internet shop. Whereas users now will initially go to Google to find web pages to comb for further information, semantic results will, to some extent, negate the need to do this.
Internalising information to Google could have repercussions for search engine optimisation strategies. For precedent, Rupert Murdoch already signalled disdain with Google News search results returning “copyrighted” content from the Sun and the Times.
News Corp’s way of dealing with Google republishing stories in its News results was swift, and expensive: paywalls.
Some trusted information sites are unlikely to oppose to Google cutting out the middle man for organic queries. But this won’t be the case across the board. How those sites react to semantic search remains to be seen: as well as how Google manages this process.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Tags: apple, data, Google, google assistant, mobile, query, results, search, semantic, SEO, siri, voice search
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
It’s becoming ever more difficult to keep track of all that you do online, especially if you employ social media as part of your marketing campaigns. Keeping all the information safe is important, and backups can be difficult to do when everything is in the cloud rather than on your hard drive.
So, whilst looking for a means to back up everything in one easy manoeuvre, I came across Backupify.com. They have a promotion on till 21st March so you get 10GB storage on the Amazon servers for a year for free, rather than the standard 2GB. You can back up Twitter, Google Docs, Facebook, Picasa, you name it. Worth a look….
Tags: automatic, back up, cloud, data, facebook, free, Promotion, social marketing data, Social Media, twitter
Posted in Blog, Small Business Resources, Social Media, Tips & Tricks
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Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
There is an interesting discussion this morning on Chinwag about data being held by third party companies, eg email service providers. This has resulted in an article written by Mark Lesbirel on ESPs, which is a must read if you outsource your email marketing, although it focuses more on the security of information and compromising the integrity of your customer data rather than outright loss of data.
Which once again raises the issue about cloud computing and the security of your data.
If you use Gmail or Hotmail, for instance, as your email provider, should their servers go down, then because they are a web-based service, you have just lost access to your email, including all your addresses. Should (unlikely but possible in the current economic climate) your webmail service provider go under, unless you have been rigorous in backing up your data to an email client on your own machine, you have just lost everything. All your archived emails, addresses – GONE!
I blogged 6 months ago about the need to back up your website, and of course hosting companies are another source for potential catastrophe if you have not backed up your data. A brief reminder – you do have the latest copy of your website in a safe place, don’t you????
Taking this further out into the cloud, many people are using social media and cloud applications for a multitude of tasks and marketing activities. Whether this is marketing through Facebook or Ning, or using online document package such as Google apps, or an ASP for CRM, accounts or similar, it is becoming ever more apparent that many do not give a second thought to back ups of the data held on such services.
The collapse of Google does not seem imminent, but there are many companies providing services to small/ medium businesses, as well as gigantic corporations, who could easily fold with little or no warning. This would make your valuable data extremely hard to rescue.
We treat data quite casually these days, with the assumption that wherever it is, it is safe. Pretty much as we assume that the worst is not going to happen in our homes and that fire/flood/theft will not occur, and are lax at considering how precious some of our belongings may prove if lost, we can be equally as ‘negligent’ with business critical data.
The worst case scenario may occur. Not saying it will, but it might, and you need to be prepared for that to happen. If you lost every email address of your customers, how much might it cost you? If your website hosting provider vanished in a puff of smoke, what would be the cost of lost business, as well as rebuilding the site? If you are holding business critical data on third party servers, then consider carefully how secure it is from a) prying eyes and b) unexpected loss.
Look at where your data is held and how safe it is, and then BACK IT UP!!
Tags: back up, data, security
Posted in Content, Small Business Resources
