Archives for January 2018

Google’s Mobile Location History

01/28/2018 by Bill Slawski 30 Comments

If you use Google Maps to navigate from place to place, or if you have agreed to be a local guide for Google Maps, there is a chance that you have seen Google Mobile Location history information. There is a Google Account Help page about how to Manage or delete your Location History. The location history page starts off by telling us:

Your Location History helps you get better results and recommendations on Google products. For example, you can see recommendations based on places you’ve visited with signed-in devices or traffic predictions for your daily commute.

You may see this history as your timeline, and there is a Google Help page to View or edit your timeline. This page starts out by telling us:

Does Google Use Latent Semantic Indexing?

01/22/2018 by Bill Slawski 44 Comments

Railroad Turntable Sign — Technology evolves and changes over time.

There was a park in the town in Virginia where I used to live that had been a railroad track that was turned into a walking path. At one place near that track was a historic turntable where cargo trains might be unloaded so that they could be added to later trains or trains headed in the opposite direction. This is a technology that is no longer used but it is an example of how technology changes and evolves over time.

There are people who write about SEO who have insisted that Google uses a technology called Latent Semantic Indexing to index content on the Web, but make those claims without any proof to back them up. I thought it might be helpful to explore that technology and its sources in more detail. It is a technology that was invented before the Web was around, to index the contents of document collections that don’t change much. LSI might be like the railroad turntables that used to be used on railroad lines.

There is also a website which offers “LSI keywords” to searchers but doesn’t provide any information about how they generate those keywords or use LSI technology to generate them, or provide any proof that they make a difference in how a search engine such as Google might index content that contains those keywords. How is using “LSI Keywords” different from keyword stuffing that Google tells us not to do. Google tells us that we should:

Google Targeted Advertising, Part 1

01/20/2018 by Bill Slawski 5 Comments

One of the inventors of the newly granted patent I am writing about was behind one of the most visited Google patents I’ve written about, from Ross Koningstein, which I posted about under the title, The Google Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent It described a social engineering approach to stop site owners from using spammy tactics to raise the ranking of pages.

This new patent is about targeted advertising at Google in paid search, which I haven’t written too much about here. I did write one post about paid search, which I called, Google’s Second Most Important Algorithm? Before Google’s Panda, there was Phil I started that post with a quote from Steven Levy, the author of the book In the Plex, which goes like this:

They named the project Phil because it sounded friendly. (For those who required an acronym, they had one handy: Probabilistic Hierarchical Inferential Learner.) That was bad news for a Google Engineer named Phil who kept getting emails about the system. He begged Harik to change the name, but Phil it was.

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Archives for January 2018