SEO by the Sea

When you walk into the lobby of Building 42 at the Googleplex, you can see a display that shows you queries entered into the search engine at any one time. It’s a mesmerizing sight, and I found myself wondering about the people and motivations behind some of the search terms I saw flowing down the screen.

Imagine that instead of seeing one query at a time, that search information was analyzed, and queries were bundled together, to maybe provide us with more meaning.

Can search engines be used to tell us what the world is thinking at anyone time? Would looking at the most popular keywords or queries that people type into a search engine provide us with some insights?

Popular Search Information from Search Engines

Continue reading Search Engines and the Most Popular Search Terms

Imagine exploring millions and millions of news pages and other documents to find information about events that are scheduled to happen in the future, to help predict the future.

This kind of future search, or future retrieval, might be able to support the making of decisions in many different fields.

News information could be used to obtain information about possible future events, and that information could be made searchable, so that it can help people plan for the future.

The Yahoo patent application is:

Continue reading The Oracle at Yahoo: Using Yahoo News to Search the Future

In Google’s search results, depending upon your query, when and where you are searching, and what your browser and search engine settings might be, you may receive a different set of search results than other folks performing a search using the same query terms.

And those results may include a mix of links and images from different data sources including Web results, images, advertisments, local business, books, products, and others.

Google’s Universal Search provides a blended mix of results which incorporate results from a number of different data respositories all together into search results.

While ads are usually segmented from other results, the remainder may be mixed together upon results pages. David Bailey, on the Official Google Blog, provided a glimpse of how those results came to be blended together in Behind the scenes with universal search. He provided an even more detailed view in a guest post at Search Engine Land titled An Insider’s View Of Google Universal Search

Continue reading How Google May Blend Information From Feeds and Extracted Data For Search Results

Does a search engine work better if it can figure out whether or not a search query is a name?

The folks at Ask.com appear to think so, and even want to know if the name is that of someone famous. I’m not sure how they measure fame, but they have a method for flagging names of the famous, as well as names that look like names, and names that really aren’t names (Brandy Alexander, anyone?)

The process is described in a patent application from Ask, and details how they might go about figuring out whether “Usher” or “50 Cent” or “Attila the Hun” refer to people, or to something else completely.

Systems and methods for predicting if a query is a name
Invented by Eric J. Glover, Apostolos Gerasoulis and Vadim Bich
US Patent Application 20070239735
Published October 11, 2007
Filed: April 5, 2006

Continue reading Ask.com on Flagging Famous People

Fact extraction is growing as a method that search engines can use to identify and understand what pages on website are about, and to collect facts about subjects and answer questions posed by people submitting queries to a search engine.

A recent paper from Google provides a nice overview of some methods being used for fact extraction. A Google patent application published last week explores looking at titles on pages, and anchor text in related pages on the same domain to determine a subject for a document.

The paper is Corroborate and Learn Facts from the Web (pdf), and the process described within it is has been called GRAZER. Here’s a little about how it works:

It starts with facts imported from one website and takes them as known facts (seed facts). Then it tries to find mentions of the seed facts on other web sites. This involves retrieving relevant pages for each entity and then corroborates facts in them.

Continue reading Google on Fact Extraction and Determining Document Subjects

When we talk about how a search engine like Google crawls and indexes information from websites, it’s often in the context of the Web results that the search engine shows to searchers.

Facts in Web Results

But, with Universal Search and blended search results showing information from local search, question answering, definitions, and others, it may make sense to start paying more attention to how the search engine is extracting facts from pages, creating “objects” from those facts, and ranking those objects.

In a post from last September, I went into a lot of detail on how a Google patent application focusing upon data practices with Local Search, titled Generating Structured Information, discussed how facts and information were taken from the Web and included in a local search repository.

Explosion of Patent Filings

Continue reading Google & Fact Extraction, Normalization, and Visualization

Yesterday, I wrote about how Google might present facts extracted from pages in timelines or maps, according to patent application filed last week.

It wasn’t the only piece of intellectual property coming out of the US Patent and Trademark Office for Google on the extraction and visualization of facts. Another that maybe even more interesting describes the possibility of a user extracting facts found in a query of the fact database, and choosing to present those facts in a number of ways.

Designating data objects for analysis
Invented by Andrew W. Hogue, David J. Vespe, Alexander Kehlenbeck, Michael Gordon, Jeffrey C. Reynar, and David B. Alpert
US Patent Application 20070179965
Published August 2, 2007
Filed: January 27, 2006

Abstract

Continue reading Google on the Extraction and Visualization of Facts