In a patent filed by Yahoo a few years back, (and excellently uncovered and covered by Bill Slawski) signals for success include site engagement metrics and a recognition of user interaction as a key metric to measuring satisfaction.
For instance, today, if you search on Google for "what does Bill Slawski say about patents? But those results will simply be documents that contain terms such as "Bill Slawski", "patents" and "say". Eventually, a semantic search engine will be able...
Bill Slawski wrote an excellent post on a patent for a method of detecting commercial queries, secured by Google in October 2011. Slawski points out that a sentence near the end of the patent application opens the process up for uses on other...
As for potential social signals that could be used for search rankings, Bill Slawski highlighted a post about Google's acquisition of some Groupivity/Appmail patents. Slawski said he's been "a little wary of correlation studies because they...
Bill Slawski even speculates that the tilde could go the way of the + search operator. That second query tells Google to return results that are similar to health but don't contain the word health. For example: search [intitle:~health] vs.intitle...
Bill Slawski offers a dozen possible methods that might have changed, including local interconnectivity, anchor text indexing, and cross-language information retrieval. More foreign language synonyms are offered based on search query terms.
Bill Slawski found a patent granted last week that explores a few different ways Google might use human raters to evaluate which algorithmic changes might produce the best results. Is the page vital, useful, relevant, slightly relevant, or off...
And everyone's favorite (search) patent uber-geek Bill Slawski also found this one: Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update. Query analysis; brand searches and CTR on queries over time Document scoring based on query analysis (filed...
The description doesn’t quite match up 100%, but most patent descriptions are illustrative examples, and the claims sections are the important parts,” wrote Bill Slawski. That is the essentially the same technology that Google uses for Google...
Bill Slawski has also analyzed the Microsoft Patent for Image Rankings (thanks to @mongoosemetrics for sharing this oldie-but-goodie hyperlink). Using the [london] search example, Bing includes search query suggestions at the top of the image...
For those interested learning about more theoretical possibilities in assessing link value, I would strongly recommend Bill Slawski's analysis of Google's 2004 "Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data.
As Bill Slawski noted: "Looking at Search Trails may provide a whole different range of searcher behavior type information. By studying the pages that people travel down, from their selected page amongst search results to a final destination page...
Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea explains that a ranking method based on mouse pointer movements would solve the click-through rate (CTR) classification riddle: users effectively do not necessarily need to click on a link to find the information...
Bill Slawski reports on a new Google patent that manipulates search results based on query patterns and click results. As Bill explains Google can track when people search for a few related terms and then click on a specific page and develop...
A recent patent application from Yahoo highlights several factors that Yahoo itself proposes to use for optimizing Web pages for its search engine, according to the ever-vigilant patent-watcher Bill Slawski.
In my recent Podcast with Bill Slawski we focused on discussing search engine ranking factors. Bill is known throughout the industry for the great work he does examining and writing about search engine patents, which he does on the SEO by the Sea...
Bill Slawski Uncovers Patent Info About Google Quality Scoring"A trio of patent applications from Google look at estimating the likelihood that an advertisement is a good one, in a method that goes beyond counting click-through-rates (CTR...
Bill Slawski Uncovers Patent Info About Google Quality Scoring"A trio of patent applications from Google look at estimating the likelihood that an advertisement is a good one, in a method that goes beyond counting click-through-rates (CTR).
Bill Slawski put up an interesting post over the weekend titled Can Web Search Use Wikipedia to Understand References to Names? Bill references a paper by Microsoft researcher Silviu Cucerzan. So if the user searches on Reggie Bush, the search...
Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea reports that a patent application for Google Blog Search reveals some of the factors that can impact ranking. Good eye, Bill. The two major factors are the relevance of the post, based upon the query used by a...
