Behind the Scenes in the Search Engine Labs
A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 7-10, 2006, San Jose, CA.
Discussing new and forthcoming developments at the search engine laboratories were panelists James Colburn, Product Manager of adCenter, MSN Search; Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Search at Yahoo; and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.
Microsoft adCenter Labs
According to Colburn, Microsoft's adCenter lab has four areas of focus:- Paid search
- Contextual ads (including text mining and concept hierarchy)
- Behavioral targeting (including age and gender prediction)
- Emerging markets (for example, video ads)
For example, one tool available at the adLabs site is the context-based acronym resolution tool, which expands abbreviations based on related query words. For example, if you type in the abbreviation "ROI" (without the quotation marks) into this tool, you will find that the most common use for this abbreviation is "region of interest," not "return on investment" as marketers might expect. Likewise, if you type in the abbreviation for the state of California, "CA" (without the quotes), you will find that this abbreviation is most commonly used for the word "cable".
Another tool that is useful for keyword research is the keyword mutation detection tool, which shows common misspellings of keywords. Just for fun, I decided to type in the word "Google" (without the quotes) to see the company name's common misspellings and was quite surprised to see 26 common misspellings. If you are doing search marketing for an industry whose target audience frequently misspells important keywords, such as the health/medical industry, this is a very useful tool.
The keyword group detection tool will also detect common misspellings, but more importantly, it will also detect other word types that searchers use. "For example, you target audience might use the word 'Halloween' as a keyword," said Colburn, "but our tool might detect a holiday theme."
Yahoo Labs
According to Horowitz, Yahoo labs' four areas of focus are community, microeconomics, information navigation and search, and user experience. For example, when analyzing communities, Yahoo researchers look at the following information:- How to know what to believe
- Trust models online and propagation
- What makes communities thrive and wither
- Tagging images and videos, and sharing these file types
Algorithms have evolved considerably since 1995. Horowitz characterized search algorithm evolution into four phases:
Phase 1: Human editorial (Yahoo directory). "In 1995, this worked because the sources were trustworthy and authoritative," he said. "The problem was that it was not scalable."
Phase 2: Mass automation (AltaVista). With mass automation, search engine software engineers were able to automate process of acquiring information on Web pages. "This process was better because it was scalable, simpler, and more granular," he said, " but the information was not authoritative and subject to many types of search engine spam."
Phase 3: Topical analysis (Google). Topical analysis uses link structure to confer authority. However, topical analysis is still subject to other types of search engine spam, such as free-for-all link farms, which can confer authority on poor-quality Web pages.
Phase 4: Social search. Builds on all earlier technologies. "Subjective queries rely on domain expertise," said Horowitz. "With social search, we are handing back domain expertise to the users."
One instance of social search in action is Yahoo Answers, which connects a searcher with a question to a community of people best suited to answer a question. For example, if you accidentally drip hot wax from a candle onto your floor, you can use Yahoo Answers to find out how to clean it up.
Google Labs
Google Labs has been a playground for search engine optimizers and marketers for a long time. Google Labs offer a wide variety of searcher toys that are not quite ready to be unveiled on the main Google site, and some developments eventually become a significant part of the Google landscape. "For example," said Norvig, "AdSense came out of Gmail. We looked at matching ads against words versus matching ads against the page content."According to Norvig, some forthcoming items from Google Labs include:
Image processing. Google is now capable of face localization. "There are important pixels in identifying a face," said Norvig. "Currently, we can identify a male or female face, but we cannot yet identify a specific person."
Fact extraction. There are well over one million facts available, such as a city or country population. "If you identify writing patterns ahead of time, go to the Web, find examples, and cluster them," he said, "you can more easily present this information to searchers."
Statistical machine translation. "Using Google language tools, a model of the English language (greater than a trillion words) and a model of translation (such as a news article in both English and Arabic)," he said, "translations can become more accurate."
Whether or not the developments from search engine laboratories are actually incorporated into search engine algorithms or the main site, becoming a tester or participant in these laboratories provides useful information to the search engines. Based on the feedback given from the interfaces and tools, search engine laboratories build tools that provide a better search experience for all users.
Shari Thurow is the Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc. and the author of the book Search Engine Visibility.
Search Headlines
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication's search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.From The SEW Blog...
- The Internet, 'Family 2.0' And The 43-Hour Day
- Google's Index Bench: Build Your Own Google Search Engine?
- First Non English University To Join Google Book Search Project
- Some Google Belgium Follow-Ups
- Google Gets Long Distance Phone Call From Space
- Yahoo Fellowships For Repressed Journalists, While Chinese Journalist Might Sue Them
- Google Aims To Make More Energy Efficient Computers
- DMA Offering Search Marketing Certification Program
- Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against AOL Over Search Data Release
- Google/Saturn Video, Google Blogoscoped
- How to get StumbledUpon, Pronet Advertising
- Podcast: AOL Hit With $658 Million+ Lawsuit Over Search Privacy; Certifying Search Marketers; Calling Google From Space, Daily SearchCast
- 'Google' your tax dollars, Associated Press
- Northeast U.S. complains of Google outages, News.com
- Comcast Denying Access to Google Sites in Massachusetts, Google Watch
- Incisive Media acquired by Apax Partners for $375MM, Equity Mind
- MySpace trumps YouTube in video, MarketWatch
- Google Advertising Platform: Winning Battles to Win the War... (or, Why My Pain is Google's Gain), Traffick
- New Faceted Search and Browsing Technology Debuts on Librarians’ Internet Index., ResourceShelf
- eBay Bails Out of China, TechCrunch
- Google Mobile Search Adds Onebox Results, Google Operating System
- Atlas of Our Changing Environment, Google Blogoscoped
- An SEOs Guide to Proxies - FAQ, SEO BlackHat
- Dynamic Phone Numbers & Extensions For Your PPC Campaigns, Search Engine Roundtable
- Growth Slows, But Online Ads Still Outpace Other Media, ClickZ
- Google searches India for takeovers, The Hindu
- Top Travel Sites, iMedia Connection
- Google Expands Google Transit With New Cities; If Your City or Metro Not Listed Lots of Other Tools, ResourceShelf
- King County bus routes hitch ride on Google mapping site, Seattle Times
- Microsoft’s Spin-Off Launching Social Networking Site Wallop; Gets $10 Million Second Round, PaidContent.org
- del.icio.us, now with six zeros, Yahoo Search Blog
- BuzzLogic calculates social media influence, ZDNet
- Webcast: Learning to Label Images (Microsoft Research), ResourceShelf
- Celestia - Explore the Universe, Google Operating System
- Alex Jones : Google Video is Censoring Me, Threadwatch
- Talking about suspended AdSense accounts on Click This!, JenSense
- Google Cross-site Request Forgery, Google Blogoscoped
- Google To PPC Branding: Drop Dead, Search Insider
Newsletter signup
Biography
Shari Thurow is marketing director at Grantastic Designs, a full-service search engine marketing, Web and graphic design firm. Acknowledged as the leading expert on search engine friendly Web sites worldwide, she is the author of the top-selling marketing book, Search Engine Visibility, published through New Riders. Shari's areas of expertise include site design, search engine optimization and usability.
Article Archives by Shari Thurow
Meet the Mobile Search Engines - Dec 26, 2006
Do Patents Point to SEO Gold? - Sep 21, 2006
Multichannel Metrics: Managing the Sea of Data - May 3, 2006
News Search Engine Optimization - Feb 21, 2006
More article archives
