Some Reverse Engineering Baloney about Google

August 18, 2011

This search engine optimization baloney is really getting on my nerves. The idea behind an index is to point to content about something. I don’t want a book index to point me to a page with information that does not match the index. In the free Web search world, the online services depending on advertising have created a mess, and now that mess has undermined the notion of relevance. Now I know what’s relevant. Relevance means those who paid to make a connection between a word or concept and the link. Precision? Recall? Works perfectly when you think about how money delivers eyeballs.

Now that I have explained my disdain for ad-supported services, let me defend one of the outfits which has driven a Hummer over the tidy algorithms for measuring precision and recall. I saw in one of my newsfeeds the spider bait title “How to Reverse Engineer Google Algorithms.”

I knew a trick when I saw.

Here’s a memorable comment:

These web crawlers are trying to get smarter at natural language processing, a sibling of computational linguistics, and they do get smarter, every day – and not just when Google or another search engine company makes major announcements on things like the Panda algorithm. Perhaps in the real world these web crawler ”smarts” are increasingly dumb and blind to global business-to-business (B2B) companies’ online marketing efforts, but that’s another story. If your company is presented with a static list of target ”phrase depth” or ”title counts” or other on-page or off-page factors as a to-do list for search engine optimization that are purported to affect every site on the web the same way, you need to know that this list is pure fiction.

Yep, search engine optimization experts are going to generate traffic with insights like these. Cut to the chase. Fire the PR firm. Just buy Adwords.

Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2011

Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Search, SEO

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.