SEO Semantics and the Vibrant Vivid Vees
January 29, 2021
Years ago, one of the executives at Vivisimo, which was acquired by IBM, told me about the three Vees. These were the Vees of Vivisimo’s metasearch system. The individual, who shall remain nameless, whispered: Volume, Velocity, and Variety. He smiled enigmatically. In a short time, the three Vees were popping up in the context of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and content discovery.
The three Vivisimo Vees seem to capture the magic and mystery of digital data flows. I am not on that wheezing bus in Havana.
Volume is indeed a characteristic of online information. Even if one has a trickle of Word documents to review each day, the individual reading, editing, and commenting on a report has a sense that there are more Word documents flying around than the handful in this morning’s email. But in the context of our datasphere, no one knows how much digital data exist, what it contains, who has access, etc. Volume is a fundamental characteristic of today’s datasphere. The only way to contain data is to pull the plug. That is not going to happen unless there is something larger than Google. Maybe a massive cyber attack?
The second Vee is variety. From the point of view of the Vivisimo person, variety referred to the content that text centric system processed. Text, unlike a tidy database file, is usually a mess. Without structure, transform and load outfits have been working for decades to convert the messy into the orderly or at least pull out certain chunks so that one can extract key words, dates, and may entities with reasonable accuracy. Today there is a lot of variety; however, for every new variant old ones become irrelevant. At best, the variety challenge is like a person in a raft trying to paddle to keep from being swamped with intentional and unintentional content types. How about those encrypted message? Another hurdle for the indexing outfit: Decryption, metadata extraction and assignment, and processing throughput. So the variety Vee is handled by focusing on a subset of content. Too bad for those who think that “all” information is online.
The third Vee is a fave among the real time crowd. The idea that streams and flows of data in real time can be processed on the fly, patterns identified, advanced analytics applied, and high value data emitted. This notion is a good one when working in print shop in the 17th century. Those workflows don’t make any sense when figuring out the stream of data produced by an unidentified drone which may be weaponized. Furthermore, if a monitoring device notes a several millisecond pattern before a person’s heart attack, that’s not too helpful when the afflicted individual falls over dead a second later. What is “real time”? Answer: There are many types, so the fix is to focus, narrow, winnow, and go for a high probability signal. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.
The three Vees are a clever and memorable marketing play. A company can explain how its system manages each of these issues for a particular customer use case. The one size fit all idea is not what generates information processing revenues. Service fees, subscriptions, and customization are the money spinners.
The write up “The Four V’s of Semantic Search” adds another Vee to the Vivisimo three: Veracity. I don’t want to argue “truth” because in the datasphere for every factoid on one side of an argument, even a Bing search can generate counter examples. What’s interesting is that this veracity Vee is presented as part of search engine optimization using semantic techniques. Here’s a segment I circled:
The fourth V is about how accurate the information is that you share, which speaks about your expertise in the given subject and to your honesty. Google cares about whether the information you share is true or not and real or not, because this is what Googles [sic] audience cares about. That’s why you won’t usually get search results that point to the fake news sites.
Got that. Marketing hoo hah, sloganeering, and word candy — just like the three Vivisimo Vees.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2021
What Makes the Web Slow? Really Slow?
January 28, 2021
I read “We Rendered a Million Web Pages to Find Out What Makes the Web Slow.” My first reaction was the East Coast Internet outage which ruined some Type A workers’ day. I can hear the howls, “Mommy, I can’t attend class, our Internet is broken again.”
Here’s a passage from the “Rendered a Million Web Pages” which I found interesting:
Internet commentators are fond of saying that correlation does not equal causation, and indeed we can’t get at causality directly with these models. Great caution should be exercised when interpreting the coefficients, particularly because a lot confounding factors may be involved. However, there’s certainly enough there to make you go “hmm”.
Yep, I went “hmm.” But for these reasons:
- Ad load times slow down my Web experiences. Don’t you love those white page hung ads on the YouTube or the wonky baloney on the Daily Mail?
- How about crappy Internet service providers?
- Are you thrilled with cache misses?
- Pages stuffed full of trackers, bugs, codes, and spammy SEO stuff.
Hmm, indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2021
Online Immortality: Suddenly Death Makes Digital Headlines
January 26, 2021
I was surprised. Yes, I was. I read three news stories within a few minutes of their appearing in my newsfeed.
The first — “AI Resurrects Legendary Spanish Singer to Hawk Beer” — explains that Lola Flores appeared in a commercial. No big deal except that Lola Flores died a quarter century ago. The article reports:
The company recreated her voice, face, and features using hours of audiovisual material, more than 5,000 photos, and a painstaking composition and post-production process, according to El País.
Some people found the recreation or deep fake quite sporty. Of course, smart software was used, but the implications for those dead are interesting to ponder. Thumb typers, activate your mobiles!
The second was “Microsoft Patent Details Tech That Could Turn Dead People into AI Chatbots.” The write up explains:
The patent, titled “Creating a conversational chatbot of a specific chatbot of a specific person,” details a system that would access images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and the like to “create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person’s personality.” In some cases, images and video could be used to create a 3D model of the person for extra realism.
Use cases range from a smart chatbot which reminds a 20 year old remote worker for a high tech company to pick up his / her clothes to a digital companion to provide support and solace when life delivers a surprise; for example, “You know you should have taken that other job. No what, smarty pants?” If you want to read the system and method behind this innovative idea hinted at by sci-fi writers, the number is US010853717. Is that my mother saying, “Stephen, tidy your desk. You know what they say about loose papers on desk or did you forget? Like you forget the garbage.”
The third write up was “Backed by Vint Cerf, Emortal Wants to Protect Your Digital Legacy from Bit-Rot.” None of that grieving family member learning via email that Facebook will not permit access to the beloved one’s account. The write up explains:
The company will use Google architecture to preserve digital memories — photographs, documents, correspondence, videos, interviews and more – indefinitely into the future. The idea is that this will ensure that as operating systems, devices and tech evolves, your entire digital legacy will remain safe, secure and accessible — to only those you choose.
The possibility are endless; for instance, targeted advertising for digital mementos, eBay listings for vehicles just like the one the loved one used to drive, and facial recognition matches from social media sites so the loved ones can locate a suitable doppelgänger.
Mashing up these services with virtual reality might provide additional opportunities for monetization. Just as one can insert Bernie Sanders into any Google Street View location, these digital constructs can enhance real time constructs. For information about the Bernie app, navigate to Engadget.
The added bonus: Search engine optimization specialists can use their methods to make sure one’s loved one pops up. Hmmm. That’s not a good phrase but it is close enough for a 2021 cornhole game.
Stephen E Arnold, January 26, 2021
SEO Trends for the New Year
January 13, 2021
Here at Beyond Search, we are quite skeptical of search engine optimization. In fact, our toothless leader, says, “SEO is a way to get struggling search engine optimization experts to become Google ad sales reps.” True or false, that’s what the old goose says.
Here are the latest pearls of wisdom from the search engine optimization world. Hackernoon discusses the “Top SEO Trends Every Digital Marketer Should Know in 2021.” Writer Muhammad Waleed Siddiqui specifies four factors to be aware of: the importance of mobile-first indexing, the impact of Google’s EAT algorithm, the changes brought by voice search, and the ascension of search intent over keywords. We actually welcome point number two, which ideally will result in more good information and less junk online. Siddiqui writes:
“The E.A.T. word stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. The concept itself covers the idea of a copywriter/writer being an original and proven professional in the industry he or she works in. Google will only accept that publicly available content that has no negative impact on people’s lives. With E.A.T. implemented in 2021, Google will genuinely look for quality and authentic content. One best way to succeed with this E.A.T. algorithm is to get good reviews from the customers and the community. If Google finds positive feedback about your website and services, your business will be considered an expert that authorized users can trust. For the SEO geeks, having high quality backlinks will help in this case. Pro-tip: If you can disavow all the bad or suspicious backlinks, it will help build up your E.A.T. score to Google.”
Anything that discourages dummy articles is a step in the right direction, we believe. Navigate to the article for details on the move away from desktop toward mobile, the difference between voiced and typed searches, and searcher intent vs. keywords.
Cynthia Murrell, January 13, 2021
The Shallowness of Search Engine Optimization: Just Buy Google Ads for Traffic
January 8, 2021
Google is in the business of selling online advertisements and playing the role of a digital real estate broker for a commission, of course, of course. Therefore, any information about how to get Google traffic for free is only mildly interesting. An entire industry of search engine optimization experts explain how to achieve the impossible: Avoid buying Google online ads. The ploy of SEO leads in one direction only; that is, the SEO professional eventually utters the words, “You need to buy Google advertising.” Free only goes so far like the charges for storage to an unsuspecting user of Gmail learns.
So what do I make of “What We Know About Google’s Passage Indexing”? Not much. The write makes clear the tissue thin thought about traffic tricks. How does one respond to Google’s indexing of paragraphs? Do nothing. How does Google’s indexing for meaning impact authors? Not at all. Why did Google make the announcement? Maybe marketing.
In my opinion, the notion of Google Passages feeds the SEO sector and greases the skids for selling more ads. When the free stuff doesn’t deliver clicks, what’s the fix?
Buy Google ads. SEO experts become a sales force for the GOOG.
Simple in my opinion. A purloined letter tactic which has demonstrated remarkable durability.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2021
BERT: It Lives
November 2, 2020
I wrote about good old BERT before.
I was impressed with the indexing and context cues in BERT. The acronym does not refer to the interesting cartoon character. This BERT is Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. If you want more information about this approach to making sense of text, just navigate to the somewhat turtle like Stanford University site and retrieve the 35 page PDF.
BERT popped up again in a somewhat unusual search engine optimization context (obviously recognized by Google’s system at least seven percent of the time): “Could Google Passage Indexing Be Leveraging BERT?”
I worked through the write up twice. It was, one might say, somewhat challenging to understand. I think I figured it out:
Google is trying to index the context in which an “answer” to a user’s query resides. Via Google parsing magic, the answer may be presented to the lucky user.
I pulled out several gems from the article which is designed to be converted into manipulations to fool Google’s indexing system. SEO is focused on eroding relevance to make a page appear in a Google search result list whether the content answers the user’s query or not.
The gems:
- BERT does not always mean the ‘BERT’. Ah, ha. A paradox. That’s helpful.
- Former Verity and Yahoo search wizard Prabhakar Raghavan allegedly said: “Today we’re excited to share that BERT is now used in almost every query in English, helping you get higher quality results for your questions.” And what percentage of Google queries is “almost every”? And what percentage of Google queries are in English? Neither the Googler nor the author of the article answer these questions.
- It’s called passage indexing, but not as we know it. The “passage indexing” announcement caused some confusion in the SEO community with several interpreting the change initially as an “indexing” one. Confusion. No kidding?
- And how about this statement about “almost every”? “Whilst only 7% of queries will be impacted in initial roll-out, further expansion of this new passage indexing system could have much bigger connotations than one might first suspect. Without exaggeration, once you begin to explore the literature from the past year in natural language research, you become aware this change, whilst relatively insignificant at first (because it will only impact 7% of queries after all), could have potential to actually change how search ranking works overall going forward.”
That’s about it because the contradictions and fascinating logic of the article have stressed my 76 year old brain’s remaining neurons. The write up concludes with this statement:
Whilst there are currently limitations for BERT in long documents, passages seem an ideal place to start toward a new ‘intent-detection’ led search. This is particularly so, when search engines begin to ‘Augment Knowledge’ from queries and connections to knowledge bases and repositories outside of standard search, and there is much work in this space ongoing currently. But that is for another article.
Plus, there’s a list of references. Oh, did I mention that this essay/article in its baffling wonderfulness is only 15,000 words long. Another article? Super.
Stephen E Arnold, November 2, 2020
Technology and New Normal Insights: What?
August 18, 2020
I read “10 Insights for the New Normal.” Remarkable. The essay was a product of IT Pro Portal and a marketing consulting firm doing business as BrandCap. What’s the connection between the new normal (which means the Rona Era) and technology? That’s is a very good question. Let’s look at three of these “insights”. I urge you to devour the remaining seven in the source document. Before I take a quick look at what I think are the the most interesting in the list of 10, I want to point out that I am not sure what “normal” means. The world is jagged, according to The End of Average. My hunch is that “normal” is a word selected because the people who read about socio-techno analysis in IT Pro Portal are “normal.” Is that a fair assumption? I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to answer this question.
Insights 1, 2, and 3 are essentially the same insight. Humans want to continue their lives in a pre-Rona manner. The new normal is the Rona Era. The third insight is that people want to get back to the pre-Rona normal. There you go. Hegel for Dummies.
Insight 6 is “Every day is like a Sunday afternoon.” I must admit this had me baffled. I then realized that I have continued to operate in the same way as I have for the last 52 years of my professional life. I don’t count years 1 to 22 when I was in college as “professional.” Moments were, maybe. But Sunday afternoon. Consider this explanation of the insight:
As lockdown stretched on and has now evolved, one of the most difficult aspects of life at home has been the sameness…Brands have an opportunity to surprise and delight through enabling the discovery of new products and experiences, both within the home and outside as people become more comfortable with the easing of restrictions.
Surprise and delight? I ordered an HDMI switch from Amazon. I was neither surprised nor delighted.
Insight 9 is a logical delight. Consider this trend: “Staying connected and disconnected.” I recall w somewhat quirky PhD in psychology whom I honestly believed was nuts telling me that schizophrenia is a mental disorder presenting itself in actions and speech that is disordered or hallucinatory. Some context may be helpful. This “wizard” and I were on numerous flights to work on a client engagement. Each flight this PhD would ask me, “Why do you wear maroon ties?” I explained that at 5 am I knew I could find a suitable tie to wear with my blue or gray suit in an efficient way. He then asked me on each flight for the next nine months, “Why do you wear maroon ties?” Which of us was crazier: Efficient me or the board certified whatever who asked the same question repeatedly?
I think I understand. One is working alone in a home office. The mobile phone only buzzes softly. The email notification is muted. Others — humanoids and allegedly domesticated animals — on the other side of a closed door. Alone yet connected. Disconnected yet reachable. The “trend” is explained this way:
The temptation for brands will be to tap into the national acceptance of on-screen comms, but brands should also be aware of the need to step away from screens and not attempt to interfere when people are disconnected.
This weekend I received three spam emails from a company which sold me three bars of an alleged French bar soap. Each email had no reference to my two previous emails sent to an entity known to me as LuckyVitamin.com. Three bars of soap and a dozen spam messages. Yep, that’s a trend. LuckyBrand.com obviously did not get the messages about the connected and disconnected paradox.
Net net: The outfit IT Pro Portal is running content marketing or search engine optimization content either intentionally (okay, I understand money) or unintentionally (yeah, that falls into the LuckyVitamin.com basket of mental behavior). A trend article might want to heed this definition:
the general course or prevailing tendency.
Self-referential statements, paradoxes, and brand awareness are not trends; these are examples of zeitgeist.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2020
The Curious Case of a SEO Expert Who Sees a Link Between Dining and DarkCyber
July 29, 2020
This is another “SEO Follies” write up by the DarkCyber research team. The essay falls into three parts: First, an explanation of why irrelevant backlinks are the rage among search engine optimization experts; second, how language becomes an irritant and a reflection on the search engine optimization company’s business methods; and, third, some reflections on the stupidity of some SEO or search engine optimization sales methods. I want to point out that SEO professionals mostly bilk unsuspecting customers by promising them that their Web page will be more findable in Google. If a company wants traffic, the company will either have to buy ads from Google or remain deep in a search results list.
The Quest for Backlinks
In my first Google monograph “The Google Legacy”, my research team and I compiled a list of publicly disclosed ranking factors. The list has been used by some universities in their information science courses (example: Syracuse University). The majority of these factors are recycled ideas from other search systems, research conducted by IBM Almaden (example: the CLEVER system), and common sense (example: the more links pointing to a Web page, the “better” that Web page is if one uses de Tocqueville’s concept of average as a way to determine what’s “good”).
The current rage for backlinks is little more than an effort to generate a false “good” score for a Web page. The present technique — practiced by charlatans like the Hustler who makes crazy videos and companies like the once prestigious Boston Consulting Group. Since The Google Legacy, two changes have taken place at Google. First, the company has expanded its grip on online advertising despite the best efforts of Amazon and Facebook. Second, the options for getting independent, objective search results from Google have decreased. The reality is that a business either buys traffic or pays a charlatan pitching search engine magic. Either way, a business has to pay for traffic. There are exceptions, but these are forced upon Google due to exogenous circumstances and most organizations cannot rely on an anomaly to publicize their existence.
The trend I have noticed is that requests for backlinks are coming more and more frequently. Here’s an example I received from a company in the UK authored by an SEO marketer delightfully named Izaak Crook. He wrote:
HI Sa,
How’s it going? I’m Izaak from AppInstitute.
I was browsing arnoldit.com and I noticed you’d covered Restaurant Technology before, linking to https://restauranttechnologynews.com/2019/07/online-food-delivery-fraud-increasing-can-tech-address-problem from http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/category/statistics/
I wondered if you’d be interested in checking out our post “7 Restaurant Technology Trends to Watch Out for in 2020”. We take a look at some of the key restaurant technologies to watch out for and how they’re going to change the industry.
If you deem it worthy of a link from arnoldit.com that would be a dream come true.
Either way, it’d be cool to discuss how we can collaborate in the future. Enjoy your Friday and speak soon!
Kind Regards,
Izaak
I had my team poke around and we learned that Mr. Crook (love that name, right?) works at a firm named AppInstitute. According the company’s Web site, the group develops “apps.” Why is an app development company wanting me to link to a story about restaurant fraud. Sure, DarkCyber covers cybercrime, but odd ball references just underline my point about SEO silliness and the belief among SEO experts that backlinks will get significant traction with the new, revenue hungry Google. (Sure, Google generates a great deal of money, but the company is smart enough to realize that the unregulated, anything world of the pre-Trump era is ending. Plus, Google costs are getting very difficult to control. Then Google has to consider the Amazon and Facebook advertising competitors. These companies are not Excite and Lycos.
The Language of the SEO World
In an email exchange with Mr. Crook (wonderful, evocative name, is it not?) he used this phrase:
Okay, Boomer.
I am a septuagenarian, 76 soon to be 77. I had to contact two members of my DarkCyber research team to get a read on the phrase “Okay, Boomer.” I was aware that a baby boomer described people born after World War II. From my team, I learned that it is:
- An age-biased slur when used to indicate that a person of age is out of touch with someone who is a thumbtyper, TikToker, and Facebook champion
- A derogatory term for a person who is older than a Gen X or Millennial
- An indicator that the person called a “boomer” is stupid, out of touch, irrelevant, a nuiscance, etc.
The team told me that if I were called a Boomer in a public setting, I could contact one of my attorneys and pursue the hate speech angle. Hate speech. Directed at a person soon to be 77. Over an overly familiar email asking for something for free.
The AppInstitute email is representative of the SEO junk I receive on a daily basis. I did not like the tone of the email and I was not happy to learn that boomer was a slur.
First, the familiarity of the “Hi” and the use of two of my initials indicates a certain casual mindset, a thought process incapable of understanding how familiarity is interpreted by someone like me as either careless or stupid. Call me old fashioned, but “Mr. Arnold” is what I prefer in business email.
Second, the reference to a Beyond Search/DarkCyber story about restaurants is amusing. I don’t write about restaurants; I eat at restaurants. Anyone who has looked at any of the more than 13,000 articles in this blog can figure out that feeding people is not one of my primary, secondary, or tertiary interests. I am not going to “check out” a frothy, probably substandard report about the restaurant industry. Apparently Izaak has not seen Yelp’s report about the state of the restaurant business. Here’s a story called “Nearly 16,000 Restaurants Have Closed Permanently Due to the Pandemic, Yelp Data Shows.” Read it, Izaak Crook. Yelp’s information obviates the need for a “report”.
Third, note the word choice. Izaak had a thesaurus handy I would wager or his prestigious employer provided him with a spam script and ready-to-roll bot:
One syllable fancy word: deem
Two syllable fancy word: worthy
Four syllable jargony word: collaborate
Then there were colloquial phrases like:
checking out
watch out for
going to change
dream come true
cool.
Izaak adds this thoughtful postscript: “Don’t want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line.”
The entire email screams spam, carelessness, failure to know to whom one is writing, and arrogance. Am I going to do something for an unknown entity named Izaak Crook without sending a bill? Answer: Not a chance.
My research team told me that the Izaak Crook entity is a person. He is the head of marketing and he is a T shaped marketer, a growth hacker, and an “SaaS fanatic.” He’s spent 14 months performing search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization for the first class outfit AppInstitute. He was a digital communications apprentice for a company called Champions UK plc. Before that he was a social media manager. I love the “apprentice” role as part of an SEO’s work history.
Now Mr. Crook (an evocative name, is it not?) markets the App Institute. A quick reveals that this top drawer outfit is an “AppBuilder for busy small business owners.” The CEO is Ian Naylor who is a serial entrepreneur. I have been told my one of my researchers that the company is small and seems to do many things, not just apps. SEO is one of those many things.
Stepping Back
I have written a number of blog posts, articles, and essays about the loss of relevance in ad-supported Web search systems. The erosion of relevance, to summarize, my conclusions is the result of three factors:
- A need to generate revenue in order to pay for indexing, updating, and serving answers to users’ queries.
- A desire on the part of marketers and webmasters to get coverage in search result pages without having to pay Google for traffic
- The more recent imperative of the ad-supported Web search engines to extend their control over flows of user behavior data.
In this environment, clicks, psychological tells via clicks, and surveillance technology mean that comprehensive data collection are essential. Traffic results from feedback loops and intentional presentation of certain content. Free visibility is not part of the game plan.
SEO marketing is going to fail. Some tactics may spoof Mother Google and deliver a short term boost. However, Mother Google wants SEO to fail because it forces the SEO wizard to herd those desperate for traffic into the advertising kill pen.
Who knows this simple game plan? Maybe the SEO expert who also moonlights as an ad sales rep for Google does? I surmise that Google continues to cultivate SEO professionals as part of the company’s ad sales strategy.
Why write me? Certainly Mr. Crook cares not a whit for my blog and content. He wants a link. He wants to make a sale. He wants to get the client to buy more and more SEO and then AppInstitute will probably sell that customer Google advertising and get a commission.
No thanks, Mr. Crook. I want no part of your SEO scam. I don’t want to help out AppInstitute. However, I do hope that the upcoming Congressional hearings lead to meaningful regulation of certain large high technology firms.
But we live in Rona times, and I must admit, the odds of ethical, responsible behavior are long.
And the links Mr. Crook (tasty, evocative name) wants? Here they are:
Izaak Crook: izaak@appinstitute.co
AppInstitute: https://appinstitute.com/
It seems to some of the DarkCyber team that “Boomer” is hate speech.
Slick marketing method indeed.
Stephen E Arnold aka “Boomer”, July 29, 2020
You Know Times Are Hard When a Blue Chip Firm Stoops to SEO
July 27, 2020
Many years ago I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. After I set up my own consulting firm, I did projects for other outfits which I thought operated in a blue-chip or high-quality mode.
If you read DarkCyber, you may have seen my articles making fun of some consulting firms’ analyses; for example, the outfits producing Gartner-type subjective comparisons enterprise vendors.
I have also been quite clear over the years about search engine optimization. The manipulation of a Web page feeds sales of online advertising and erodes what minimal objective relevance ranking methods remain in use. From my point of view, SEO is a scam. If you want traffic, buy advertising.
Why take time to write again about questionable consulting operations and SEO?
I received this email a day or two ago, and I have informed the sender that I would publish the email, his name, his contact information, and his employer before this item runs in my blog. Now the spam email. Please, note the chatty tone:
We noticed that you featured Boston Consulting Group in four of your articles (Gartner Magic Quadrant in the News: Netscout Matter, Radicati Group: Yet Another Quadrant, Search Engine Optimization: Chasing Semantic Search & Search Companies: Innovative or Not?) and wanted to say thanks so much for the mentions!
We were hoping you could add a link to our homepage [https://www.bcg.com/] in those articles so your readers can easily find the site. Please let me know if you have any questions or if I should direct this email to someone else. Thanks again for your help in advance.
Sincerely,
Connor Hayes
Connor Hayes Hayes.Connor@bcg.com
Global Search Senior Coordinator
T + 1 617 850 3941
Boston, USA
Allow me some observations, and I will offer some comments for Connor Hayes and other SEO “experts”:
1. Connor, and spare me your slathering of Dollar Store taco sauce. I am not into familiarity or hippy dippy “I want a link” pitches.
2. Boston Consulting Group, let’s be classy. SEO spam is something that I associate with outfits less well positioned to sell high-end professional services work.
I asked myself, “Was Connor Hayes influenced by Homer on “The Simpsons”?
I asked myself, “Has BCG lost its sense of professionalism?”
I do recall learning from my father who worked for an entrepreneur R. G. LeTourneau that General Eisenhower and later president of the United States was not impressed that Bruce Henderson, founder of BCG “borrowed” the four square matrix analytic tool. When I heard this anecdote, I suppose the state was set for today’s BCG to embrace search engine optimization. Both the four square star-dog thing and SEO illustrates a similar thought process: Do what needs to be done to become a modern day winner.
I segment the world of professional services consulting into some simple chunks. At the bottom are newly unemployed managers, unemployable college graduates with degrees in home economics, art history, or some similar expertise, and people who just cannot stick with a legitimate company. Many of these individuals become SEO experts.
Then there are mid-tier consulting firms. These firms capture government contracts, find a niche and generate information and knowledge products, and pontificate on LinkedIn about their organizations’ mastery of knowledge-value in today’s world.
The third group is the top of the professional services pyramid. My perception was that the big leagues attracted the best and the brightest. Examples of these top-tier operations included Arthur D. Little, Bain (formed by unhappy professionals at Boston Consulting Group), BCG itself and its four square star dog thing, Booz, Allen & Hamilton, McKinsey & Company, SRI, and a handful of others.
The names I assign each level are:
- Pigeons, the flocks of consultancies pecking for anything that will sustain them
- Azure-chip consultants, the myriad of good enough firms that pontificate on everything from Amazon AWS to Zulu refugee buying preferences in South Africa
- Blue-chip consultants, the Big Leagues of professional consulting and advisory services.
Some observations are warranted, at least to my way of thinking:
- Blue-chip consulting firms once marketed via word of mouth, repeat business, and sponsoring awards like the original McKinsey payoff for the “best” Harvard Business Review article. Sorry, BCG, McKinsey aced you out there. SEO is definitely a winner for some like Twitch or YouTube luminaries. (Why not retain Dr. Disrespect to build an audience for BCG’s services? He is available for promotional work at this time I believe?)
- The economic downturn appears to require scraping the dregs from the wine barrel for sales leads. Yes, SEO, the better way. Forget the white papers, the speeches, and the thought leadership. It is apparently short cut time.
- The larger issue is that desperation marketing seems to be okay for a once-prestigious firm’s management team. The use of Connor Hayes-type intellects to get me to point to a formerly respected consulting firm is either the sign of a Ted Kaczynski-type thought process or stupid.
Net Net: The fact that BCG appears to endorse and desire SEO backlinks is more evidence of a decline within the ranks of top-tier consulting firms’ marketing and PR methods.
PS.
Connor Hayes, as you progress in your SEO career, why not get ManyVids or TikTok influencers to promote BCG? Let me know when you become a partner, please.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2020
NLP with an SEO Spin
July 8, 2020
If you want to know how search engine optimization has kicked librarians and professional indexers in the knee and stomped on their writing hand, you will enjoy “Classifying 200,000 Articles in 7 Hours Using NLP” makes clear that human indexers are going to become the lamp lighters of the 21st century. Imagine. No libraries, no subject matter experts curating and indexing content, no human judgment. Nifty. Perfect for a post Quibi world.
The write up explains the indexing methods of one type of smart software. The passages below highlights the main features of the method:
Weak supervision: the human annotator explains their chosen label to the AI model by highlighting the key phrases in the example that helped them make the decision. These highlights are then used to automatically generate nuanced rules, which are combined and used to augment the training dataset and boost the model’s quality.
Uncertainty sampling: it finds those examples for which the model is most uncertain, and suggests them for human review.
Diversity sampling: it helps make sure that the dataset covers as diverse a set of data as possible. This ensures the model learns to handle all of the real-world cases.Guided learning: it allows you to search through your dataset for key examples. This is particularly useful when the original dataset is very imbalanced (it contains very few examples of the category you care about).
These phrases may not be clear. May I elucidate:
- Weak supervision. Subject matter experts riding herd. No way. Inefficient and not optimizable.
- Uncertainty sampling means a “fudge factor” or “fuzzifying.” A metaphor might be “close enough for horse shoes.”
- Guided learning. Yep, manual assembly of training data, recalibration, and more training until the horse shoe thing scores a point.
The write up undermines its good qualities with a reference to Google. Has anyone noticed that Google’s first page of results for most of my queries are advertisements.
NLP and horse shoes. Perfect match. Why are the index and classification codes those which an educated person would find understandable and at hand? Forget answering this question. Just remember good enough and close enough for horse shoes. Clang and kha-ching as another ad sucks in a bidder.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2020
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