The Impact of Social Signals in Search
January 1, 2012
Last year both Google and Bing announced that they would be using social signals to help rank search results. Econsultancy reported on the impact of social signals on digital marketing in the article “Social Signals in Search: What is the Impact?”
According to the article, a recent survey found that only 25 percent of company marketers currently regard social signals as ‘very important’ for determining search rankings. However, when asked how important they would be in three years’ time, the percentage increased to 57 percent.
Andrew Girdwood, Media Innovations Director at bigmouthmedia, said:
Social signals are used, at the very least, to validate traditional link signals. For example, a page that appears to have many inbound links and is relatively young but which has earned no social signals is a statistical outlier. Google is upfront about being suspicious about statistical outliers. Avoiding Google’s suspicion is important in SEO. What’s not in doubt is the ability social media successes have at showing content worthy of links to a large community of people able to create those links. All SEO campaigns should have social elements.
With the invention of Google+, the first serious combination of search and social, businesses will be forced to confront the importance of social signals. Our view: social is no silver bullet.
Jasmine Ashton, January 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
60 Months, Minimal Search Progress
January 1, 2012
When I was writing the Enterprise Search Report, I was younger, less informed, and slightly more optimistic. I wrote in August 2005 “Recent Trends in Enterprise Search”:
The truth is that nothing associated with locating information is cheap, easy or fast.
I omitted one item: accurate. About five years after writing this sentence, I have come to my senses. The volume of information flushing through the “tubes” continues to increase. To explain what petabytes means to the average liberal arts major now working at a services firm, someone coined the phrase “big data.” Simple. Tidy. Inaccurate.
That’s why the notion of accurate information is on my mind. I am tough to motivate in general, and burro like when I have to admit that something I wrote in one of my addled states is incomplete, stupid, or just plain wrong.
Let me start the New Year correctly. Here are four observations which will probably annoy the “real” experts, the self appointed search mavens, and the failed middle school teachers now consulting in the fields of ontology, massive parallelization in virtual environments, and “big data.” I don’t plan to alter my rhetorical approach, so too bad about giving some of these rescued Burger King workers some respite. Won’t happen.
First observation: Even a person as wild-and-wonderful as Jason Calacanis, the much admired innovator who makes a retreating Russian army’s scorched earth policy look green, wants to limit Internet content. “Jason Calacanis: Blogging Is Dead & Why Stupid People Shouldn’t Write” captures his take on accuracy. If one assumes stupid people should not write, then one reason may be that stupid people produce inaccurate information. Sounds okay to me, so let’s go with the stupid angle. In the era of “big data”, trimming out the stupid people should result in higher value information. Keep in mind I am addled. I am not sure where to stand on the “stupid” thing.
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Image source: http://www.northernsun.com/Boldly-Going-Nowhere-T-Shirt-(8257).html
Second observation: Disinformation is becoming easier for me to spot. For you? I am not so sure. Let me give you a couple of examples. Navigate to the now out of date list of taxonomy systems prepared by Will Power. The page is available from Willpower Information in Middlesex. Now scan the description of the taxonomy system called MTM. Here’s a snippet:
MTM is the software for multilingual thesauri building and maintenance. It has been designed as a configurable system assisting a user in creating concepts, linking them by means of a set of predefined relations, and controlling the validity of the thesaurus structure…
The main features of the software are inter alia:
- thesaurus maintenance and support system;
- KWOC and full tree representation and navigation tools available on-line;
- KWIC, KWOC and full tree printouts (in an alphabetic and systematic order);
- defining and customization of up to 100 conceptual relationship types;
- management of facets, codes (top classification), sources, regional variants, historical notes, etc.;
- support of the various types of authority files;
- computer assisted merging;
- thesauri comparison by means of windows;
- support of the various alphabets;
- support of linguistic and orthographic variants;
- sorting facilities consistent with national standards;
- variable length data handling;
- flexibility in defining input and output forms;
- versatility in terms of relative ease of configuring the software for the various sets of languages;
- flexibility in defining data structures needed for a given application;
- a possibility to exchange data with other organizations and systems through exporting and importing terms and relations.
The Dumbest Social Media Users of 2011
January 1, 2012
People say dumb things. Magnify that statement by about 10,000 and make your thoughts and activities available for all of your friends, family members, and coworkers to see and you have social media content.
Gawker reported on the top social networking sites in the article “Who Had the Dumbest Users In 2011: Facebook, Twitter, or Google?”
According to the article, Facebook, Google and Twitter have all published their year-in-review lists, allowing Gawker to definitively answer the question of, who had the dumbest users in the year 2011?
After sharing the top five posts, hashtags, and search results for all three social media sites, the article concluded:
Facebook had the dumbest users in 2011. While Google and Twitter users displayed at least a modicum of interest in things that actually matter, the dominant topics on Facebook were cries for attention from other dumb Facebook users. Facebookers stumbled through the year in a haze of cheap endorphins flooding their brains with every “like.” Clearly, normally intelligent adults revert to miserable high-schoolers when on Facebook.
Yikes! What can we expect from next year’s lists?
Jasmine Ashton, January 1, 2012
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