April 2006 - Page 2 of 3 - SEO by the Sea ⚓

Google micropayments patent application published

01/07/202204/13/2006 by Bill Slawski

There’s been a lot of speculation that Google would launch some type of micropayment system soon, and a patent application issued today seems to bring that closer to us. Micropayments inevitable This isn’t the first patent application from Google that talks about micro-payments. One from a couple of years ago, Method for searching media , … Read more

Google Voice Query Patent Granted

07/06/202004/11/2006 by Bill Slawski

Google was granted a patent today on a voice query interface. There are many potential issues with understanding speech when trying to perform searches by voice query, which are described by the patent filing. With most speech recognition technology, there can be high error rates when the vocabulary used is large, and the amount of … Read more

Adding more factors to Microsoft’s sliders

07/23/201104/11/2006 by Bill Slawski

Ever use MSN’s sliders? Do you know about MSN’s sliders? If they changed, would you notice? I’m not sure that I would. A couple of days ago, I wrote about feature based rankings at MSN. Rather than describing how understanding feature based ranking (or fRank) might help when optimizing a site for an MSN search, … Read more

20 links on search and design

01/07/202204/10/2006 by Bill Slawski

I compiled another quick list of links this week, but you might want to read them fast, because as Kid Mercury noted almost a week ago, On April 11, The Internet Gets Destroyed (No longer available) OK, it might not be demolished, but it may just be broken in many places after Microsoft issues a … Read more

Ranking Search Results Using Featured Based Rankings

06/17/202004/08/2006 by Bill Slawski

How does one optimize pages for MSN, given that they use a machine-based ranking system for ranking search results and returning results to visitors?

Some new research from Microsoft and some recently released patent applications might provide some ideas.

Before I dive into this, I want to point out Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for MSN’s RankNet Technology by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy, which takes a look at Microsoft’s Ranknet Technology. It’s a good introduction to some of the research that Microsoft has been doing lately.

Query independent ranking

Ranknet is discussed more in a paper to be presented in May at the WWW2006, titled Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking. It provides a detailed look at how human ranked pages can be used to identify other high-quality pages, without relying upon the link structure of the web.