| Recent Articles |
Rand Fishkin’s Tips For More Traffic
Every site owner wants one thing: more visitors. After that, their requests might vary from "more with my family" to "more ice cream in the freezer," but they can all agree on that one wish.
AOL's PR Is Broken
Just when it seems things can't get worse
for AOL, it appears they have a mole leaking
information to Consumerist.com....
Creating a Link Campaign
There are many different reasons out there fore creating a link campaign; after all, it can benefit you in so many different internet marketing strategies.
Linking Strategies: To Buy or Not to Buy
Buying text links for your website is a highly controversial subject online. Like it or not, approve of the practice or disapprove, it does exist and there are many website owners who are doing it.
Does Web 2.0 Support Net Neutrality?
Sitting at the Vloggercon show again, and I came to hear on the panel on Net Neutrality - an area that really does interest me, mainly because of the deafening silence in the Web 2.0 community. Huge silence.
Relevancy Rules in Sponsored Search Ads
Let me quote some rather startling numbers
to you from a recent eye tracking study we
did. In the study, we looked at where people
first looked on a search results page, where
they first scanned a listing...
|
|
|
|
| Recent WebProNews Articles |
SES 2006 Kicks Off Today
The Search Engine Strategies 2006 conference in San Jose begins today, and we plan to bring some inside coverage of the sessions to our readers throughout the week as a variety of noteworthy speakers deliver...
Advertising Auction System Unwelcomed
For a while, it looked as if eBay was going to bring commercials to your television. A number of companies were willing to try out "an auction-based system for..."
Delicious Polishes Its Network Badge
The new network badge from Delicious arrived as the social bookmarking company continues to integrate its services with new owner Yahoo. Delicious has maintained its minimalist design and its popularity...
Google/AP Deal To Spawn New Product
For many publishers and news providers, being included in the Google News index is a good thing. It's a traffic driver. For the Associated Press, it's another matter because AP content is syndicated in publications worldwide...
IAB, Google, Yahoo Defining Clicks
The Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com, and others have established a working group to define a standard for clicks, in an effort to identify valid and invalid ones on search advertising.
|
|
|
|
08.07.06
SES 2006: Social Search Overview
 By David A. Utter
Search Engine Watch executive editor Chris Sherman hosted the session on social search, which covered the impact of human knowledge and activity on search engines.
Managing editor Mike McDonald of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session on social search.
Chris Sherman opened the session by defining social search, calling it a collection of Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. That judgment takes place in the form of tags, click-through activity, search history, and other actions.
That may be as good as the definition gets for some time. There isn't a standard definition for social search yet, and a lot of companies big and small would not mind being the ones to shape it.
Sherman credited World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee with being the first to create a guide that was the earliest form of social search. At that point, search engines were inefficient; algorithmic search methods had not arrived yet.
Fast forward from 1990 to 2006. Social search is having an impact. "Increasingly we're seeing search engines coming out with personalization efforts," said Sherman. "That data is going to be fed back into the loop and impact the general search."
"What search engines are doing is saying, 'hey lets tap into this huge resource of user brainpower' to improve search results."
Social search has hit some problems along the way. The scale and scope of information has grown so much that automation, like Yahoo Search, has had to take the place of the original hand-edited manual directory.
"I'm not sure people, even millions of people, ARE going to be able to keep up with all this information," said Sherman.
The ambiguity of language has led to tagging issues. "On the Web we don't have controlled vocabulary, even if we did, we aren't going to use it," Sherman commented, and he is right about that.
Human laziness and search spider dumbness make things difficult, too. But the worst problem comes from those who exploit whatever they can online for personal gain - the spammers.
Said Sherman: "Any system that emerges in search, there are people who will aggressively do whatever they can to optimize their content." He thinks trust networks will emerge as disenchantment with useless spam content increases along with spammer knowledge of how new systems work.
Grant Ryan, chief scientist at Eurekster, spoke next. He called Eurekster a printing press, not a publisher.
By enabling people to build vertical searches with Eurekster, site publishers can optimize their search for a specific audience, and monetize their work.
Ryan's talk led into that of Tim Mayer of Yahoo. He disclosed the launch of Yahoo Search Builder, which essentially puts Yahoo in competition with Eurekster.
Mayer, a long-time veteran of SES, summarized social search as "better search through people."
"Websearch is not very good for subjective queries," Mayer said. "In social search you are staking your reputation."
No one wants to looks bad at answering a subjective query. The best answers may come out of the growing number of users who tag content. "We see the next breakthrough as using the tagging community as sources of authority," said Mayer.
Nils Pohlmann from Microsoft also spoke on social search, saying it "is enabling social network to refine or create additional search results."
"In the past, community content used to be chat in user forums and newsgroups. Today there are many other more interesting sources."
Like Mayer, Pohlman noted that reputation is important in social search. Microsoft's Ideas Live beta lets others see the reputation score others have earned.
"Building up reputation is critical," he said.
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
|
