SEO by the Sea

Author Ranking in social media is more than just a popularity contest, and can include things like how frequently an author surfaces content that subsequently becomes popular, topical authority on different subjects, and popularity and influence signals.

Author Authority to Distinguish Signal From Noise?

Social media contains a lot of signal, and a lot of what might be considered noise. Within social streams of real time communication such as tweets and status updates and blog posts is information that can be invaluable on many different topics.

How does a search engine pick out which authors are actual authorities on different topics, and which are sharing and resending and adding to authoritative content? How does it tell which authors are piggybacking off such content, and which authors just really aren’t authorities on any given topic?

Some authors aren’t even real people, but instead exist as spam and/or aggregator accounts, adding little or no value to other members of a social network.

Continue reading Microsoft Weighs in on Ranking Authors in Social Networks

Google published 8 patent applications at the USPTO today that describe key elements of Google Plus and a number of alternatives that may or may not become part of Google’s social network. These include 2 applications on how social connections can be sorted into different social circles, 4 filings about how content can be shared in the system, and 2 more pending patents on differences in what might be shown to the author of content created on the social network and what might be visible to people viewing that content who aren’t the authors.

The patent filings are pretty detailed, and if you’ve spent some time using Google Plus, you’ll recognize a lot of the features being described within the patents, and see some that you might wish were included and others you may hope are never added.

Continue reading Social Circles, Content Sharing, and Social Visibility Pending Patents for Google Plus

While Google’s social search activities have been fairly well publicized and discussed, and in some areas criticized, Bing appears to be fairly busy working on their own social search approach a little more quietly…

When Google introduced their Search Plus Your World social search results this past January, they were to a degree following in the footsteps of Bing, who announced last May that they would deliver Facebook based social search results when you’re logged into Facebook and searching at Bing, in their blog post Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing.

People often share a fair amount of information about themselves on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook including what they are presently doing, how they feel and more. An interview by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, Paul Yiu, who runs Bing Social Search, uncovers some aspects of how Bing’s personalized social search works.

The post, titled Author Authority and Social Media with Bing’s Paul Yiu uncovers some aspects of Bing’s approach to social search that you might not have been aware of if you haven’t been paying attention. The post provides a convenient overview before the start of the interview on how Bing might be calculating things like authorship authority from Twitter (and likely Facebook as well).

Continue reading Bing’s Search Plus Your World?

A newly published pending patent application from Google provides some insights into the display of social search results. Before digging into it, here’s a quick peek into the evolution of social search on Google.

The Evolution of Social Search on Google

In December of 2009, Google introduced social search, showing social search results to searchers at the bottoms of those search results. The people who were included in those results came from a few different sources according to the Official Google Blog post announcing it. This “social circle of friends” would come from connections listed upon your public Google profile, such as a link to your Twitter profile or FriendFeed profile, or people you chat with or email on Gmail, or from some websites that you might subscribe to on Google Reader. Those social results are specific to the people viewing them, so you would need to be signed into your Google Account to have them displayed to you.

Google also introduced “real time” search results in the same month, which displayed a scrolling set of results relevant to a query that you performed from a number of sources including news sites, blogs, and social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others:

Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.

Continue reading Google’s Social Search Patent Application

There’s been some chattering on the Web recently that Yahoo! might pursue a patent infringement case. If true, I suspected that the Overture patents on Advertising might be part of any case brought. Looks like I was right in thinking so.

Earlier today, AllThingsD published a fairly detailed post titled Yahoo Sues Facebook for Patent Infringement, Which Social Network Calls “Puzzling” (Including Filing) which tells us about the some of the history, implications, and reactions to a legal complaint filed earlier today which lists 10 patents that Yahoo! claims Facebook is infringing upon. The article includes a copy of the complaint which listed the patent numbers involved, and specific claims based upon each of those patents.

The patents included Overture’s advertising patents as well as Yahoo! patents on advertising, social networking, customization, privacy, and messaging.

After reading through the complaint, I wanted to take a look at the patents and share them. What implications does this patent infringement case have for Facebook, not only focusing upon advertising, but also upon acting as a social network? Here are the patents involved in the case:

Continue reading Yahoo Patents in Facebook Patent Infringement Case

Google has been busy over the past couple of years acquiring a good number of small startups, including some that may help or have helped contribute features to Google Plus, such as Fridge, Tweet counting SocialGrapple, people sorting Katango, the team behind JustSpotted, social ranking PostRank, and social movie recommendation service fflick.

Google hasn’t publicly announced every acquisition that it has made, and the search engine has also purchased intellectual property such as pending and granted patents from some companies as well, without necessarily buying the companies behind the patents. For example, in August of 2010, Google was assigned a handful of patent filings from Appmail, LLC, recorded at the USTPO in May of 2011. A pending and a granted patent from that group appear to be related to Grouptivity, which was a social service run by Appmail that used a social mail service to enable people to share content they found on the web with others, either privately or publicly. That service allowed for the creation of groups to “keep your personal contacts separate from co-workers and other categories.” As a publisher-centric web service, grouptivity was described as a service that:

Continue reading Google Plus Roots are Showing in Grouptivity Patent Filings

If you’ve never used Twitter before, it can be a little intimidating when you’re first starting out. You’re faced with a message on the front page of the site telling you to “Follow your interests,” and promising “instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world.”

Then you sign up, and you’re faced with an empty text box with a question above it asking you “What’s Happening?” You have no friends added yet, you’re not following any industry experts or favorite celebrities, and there’s no news about what’s happening around the world. But you might see tweets in more languages than just English, according to a whitepaper presented last month.

The site does have ways to help you search for and find people to follow and interact with, and will recommend people to follow in a few places, but trying to figure out exactly what to say in that box that asks “what’s happening,” isn’t that easy. I remember spending more than a couple of days trying to figure that out myself.

Continue reading Twitter Differences in Different Countries

Are you a robot? A spammer? A sock puppet? A trusted author and content developer? A trusted agent in the eyes of Google? (More on trusted agents below.)

When you interact on a social network, or write a review online or update information to an internet mapping service, how much does the service you are using trust the content that you add, or the changes that you might make?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, but rather ones at the heart of approaches from services like Google Web search and Google Maps, which are focusing more and more upon social signals and social collaboration to provide the information that they do to the public.

If you’ve seen a +1 button within Google’s search results or on a site, and you’ve clicked upon it, or shared a page or post or site in Google Plus with others, you’ve engaged in endorsing the work of the author who created that site. How much weight does Google give that endorsement?

If you find an error on a Google Place page, such as an incorrect phone number or bad street address, and you take the time to try to correct that, what process might Google go through to decide if you’re telling the truth?

Continue reading Are You Trusted by Google?