keywords

What do quantum disorder and Google have in common?

Posted by Chris Dugdale April 12th, 2009

Could random matrix theory, as used to analyse disorder in quantum systems, be the next thing to challenge Google?

In the April 4th edition of New Scientist, there was an article entitled "Quantum mathematics could boost keyword searches" – although the website article bears a slightly more provocative title: "Could quantum mathematics shake up Google?". It reports on a mathematical technique called random matrix theory, used by one Pedro Carpena in the analysis of disorder in quantum systems, that might just be the next big thing in search.

What it boils down to is this. Critical words to the subject of a text tend to cluster in certain areas within the copy. When a concept is introduced and explored, key words are used frequently, and then drop off in frequency as the text evolves. Conversely, common, yet irrelevant, words (what some people refer to as stop words or sentence glue) tend to be scattered through the text fairly evenly. As a result, analysing the clustering of words gives a better picture than frequency or density analysis.

Now, modern search engines are not using anything as simple as keyword density analysis these days, but could this, as the article’s title rather sensationalist asks, "shake up Google"? The results produced seem a little hit an miss, with both "you" and "I" appearing in the top-five for both The Odyssey and Moby Dick. It does however, seem to generate some interesting results with all the spaces removed from the text, but that is a different discussion.

While Carpena’s method may be good at pulling relevance from a unbiased text, how good is it at pulling actual relevance from a biased text? Compiling a list of relevant words from a text isn’t the hard part, search engines are already pretty good at identifying text that is relevant to a search; the difficulty is pulling relevance from a text that is deliberately misleading. New analysis algorithms will just force people to develop new ways of gaming the system. The real challenge is in the separation of the wheat from the chaff.

To my mind, this is where many journalists fall down; too many ask if the latest clever method of discerning relevance is the next Google killer, but few look at what Google is actually struggling to achieve. Let’s face it, they have text analysis down pat – while it may not be as elegant as some sophisticated quantum analysis technique, Google will return pages with text that is fairly relevant to your search words. What it struggles with though, is matching the meaning of the search with the intent of the content.

We have all done it. We have been looking for customer reviews on our next intended purchase to see if it has been well-received by its current users, only to find that the search results are cluttered with pages selling the product and somewhere on each is an unpopulated review section. Another scenario is the "this mp3 player isn’t an ipod" style ebay listings.

There are plenty of pages out there that mislead or misrepresent, and there is nothing more frustrating than wading through piles of valueless results that promise the Earth. It is advances toward filtering out these from the short-list of relevant pages that will bring the next quantum-leap in search.

Tags: Google, keywords, search, spam

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Google’s new search refinements – how will it affect you?

Posted by Ian Macfarlane March 25th, 2009

Google has announced two changes to how it displays its search results pages. These changes have been rolled out across 37 languages worldwide. In this post, we explore what the changes to their “search refinements” means to webmasters.

Google has recently made changes to their “search refinements” feature. These are the links that Google includes at the bottom (and sometimes at the top) of their search results pages which provide a number of suggestions for a searcher to narrow their search down.

Google has introduced new technology that can “better understand associations and concepts related to your search”. Aside from leading to changes in the search refinements which they display, they have also increased the number of these that they may show.

For example, when searching for [

Image courtesy of Google.

How might this affect you?

Firstly, as the algorithm powering these search refinements has changed, this means that many of the suggested searches will also have changed. If your site used to get traffic from people clicking on these, it may no longer do so as this particular suggestion may no longer be listed. Conversely, your site may suddenly start to receive traffic from new search refinements.

Secondly, as the number of search refinements has increased, this means that the chance of clicking on any particular one will have decreased.

Thirdly, a combination of an increased number of search refinements and (if we believe Google) an increase in the relevance of these suggestions will likely lead to an increase in the number of searches who use them. This is obviously good for sites which rank well for the suggested searches of high-traffic queries, particularly when these refinements are listed at the top of the search page rather than the bottom. It will also obviously lead to an increase in longer-tail searches.

However, this is not all good news – for every site gaining visitors, another site has to lose them. It is likely that the number of searchers clicking through to page 2 and beyond will decrease as searchers use these links instead, so sites which rank on page 2 for high volume queries (which can still drive a fairly significant amount of traffic for top terms) will likely see a decrease in their traffic for these terms.

The location of the search refinements on the search results page for a particular query will also affect their impact on traffic. Where the search refinements are included at the bottom of a results page it may distract visitors away from site sites ranking just above it, but where Google places them at the top of the results page the impact could potentially be much greater – searchers may click directly onto one of these search suggestions rather than looking through any of the top 10 sites they searched for.

The action that webmasters need to take from this is simple – in addition to the keywords that site owners should already be targeting, they also need to look at the most important search refinements. Look at the most popular searches in your industry niche and look at the search refinements that Google provides. These are keywords that you might want to target next.

After this simple keyword research step all of the usual keyword suggestions apply as per normal (include the most important words in your title tag, try to include the words in the same order, etc). Where Google places the search refinements at the top of the page rather than the bottom, these should be given higher priority as they will likely drive a far larger percentage of traffic than where they are included at the bottom of the page.

How will this change the shape of search?

The short tail – Searchers will be encouraged away from the more common shorter-tail queries, so the short-tail will likely shrink to an extent.

The middle tail – The number of refinements that will be suggested is limited – therefore, we foresee a fattening of what might be termed the “middle-tail”, that is, queries which are not huge traffic drivers but which are still searched for on a regular basis.

The long tail – The true “long tail” of search queries is distinctly different in nature. Remember that Google has said that roughly 20-25% of search queries they have never seen before. The long tail will be affected to an extent, as people may find what they want via query refinements rather than resorting to long queries, but there will always be users who type unusual queries into the search engines.

As with any change in Google there are winners and losers. Searchers will be more likely to use a wider variety of search queries, meaning that the number of potential visitors will be spread out more evenly across multiple queries. As different websites will rank for different terms, this may result in a “spreading out” of visitors across a greater number of different web sites.

Sites that ranked well for high traffic terms might potentially see a drop in traffic, but the increase in search precision from these more targeted phrases should hopefully mean that searchers are directed to the pages on your site that are most relevant to what they are looking for. That, I think we can all agree, is good for everyone.

Tags: Google, international, keywords, language, long tail

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Search engine relevance and keyword selection.

Posted by Manley November 10th, 2007

Relevance, or at least user perception of relevance, is of massive importance to search engines, but there is still a limit to what they can glean from a user’s search terms.

How will you optimise your pages to get maximum conversions from your traffic?

We managed to pour hot tea all over our baby last night, (there will be more than a few hospital visits but she will be fine) which serves to highlight two important issues:

Babies can grab your cup much faster than you can stop them, so hot drinks and babies do not mix and, no matter how much they cry, they have to stay off your lap.
High performance keywords are not always as obvious as one might think.

If you have ever been involved with a search campaign, be it in-house or through an agency, then you will have needed a keyword list of some kind.

You probably did not build the list yourself; it is, after all, tedious and difficult work. The users you are targeting will generally know very little about your market, many of them will be unable to spell and some of them will phrase their search in the form of a verbal question, à la 1998 Ask Jeeves. There will be long-tail opportunities that are missed, too many vanity keywords and by four o’clock all you want is a couple of Garibaldis and a cup of tea. It is not due until tomorrow anyway, is it?

I would argue that keyword selection is the most important step in any search campaign. Even before selecting a domain, the researching of keywords should have produced a comprehensive and accurate list of the search terms being used by potential customers and have indicated which of those keywords or phrases are most likely to convert.

All too often I see sites spending exorbitant amounts of time and effort chasing trophy keywords with almost zero ROI. Turning up in searches for some prestige keywords is not necessarily a bad thing – brand exposure is an important part of on-line marketing, but if a car manufacturer is looking to rank for [car] (and you will note that there are no manufacturers being returned on the first page of Google) then they are never going to see enough conversions to justify the expense.

The best example that I have been given of this is [life insurance]/[life assurance] and, rather than try to better it, I am going to plagiarise the analogy.

Insurance pays out on an event which might occur, whereas assurance pays out on something which will occur. Life plans are generally assurance policies, since we are all going to die (even those policies with a fixed termination date are general offering term assurance). Accidental death or terminal illness cover is insurance, but the majority of policies taken to cover death are assurance policies.

A quick glance at Google Trends will show how few people are aware of the difference and highlights why everyone selling life assurance on-line is also targeting [life insurance]. This is a very obvious example, but in your industry there will be more subtle ones and until you have done some detailed keyword research you are missing a huge, and more often than not cheap, chunk of your potential market.

Now, how did the NHS miss that panicking parents might not use ‘scald’ and who would have imagined that someone would pen a track called hot water burn baby anyway?

Tags: keywords

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