Most politicians are old; it’s basically a job requirement. It makes sense. The accruement of knowledge takes time and learning what to do with it takes practice.
Not many politicians would be classed as outright ‘ignorant’, but I’m afraid that if you can’t tell me, generally, the difference between Facebook and Google, you’ve got some modern learnin’ to do. And let’s face it, we can’t learn ourselves any younger, so it’s all politicians really have. The fact is the Internet, search engines, keywords, and link graphs are all areas of knowledge that politicians, or at least their right-hand-peeps, need to get their over-educated heads around, right about now. Read More »
*Update – NY Judge has delayed hearings in the Google Book Deal – read all about it*
Much of humanity’s knowledge is in the process of being digitized, and a new set of rules are currently in draft-mode concerning how this wealth of knowledge may (or may not) be made available to the public.
If you’ve ever read a book, or wanted to, if you’ve ever searched Google, or dreamed of it, you might want to catch up on the latest developments in our civilization’s fight for access to information. More recently, as physical copies of literature have become less relevant to the public, being able to effectively access their digital counterparts becomes increasingly important. This is an opinion piece, and all of ‘em are mine, the author, so don’t go blaming anybody else if your sensibilities are touched. With that disclaimer made, on with it!
Walking down the street the other day a friend of mine turns to me and asks: Hey, so you work with Google or whatever, what the hell is the big deal? Why am I constantly hearing about this ridiculous company with a childish logo, I mean, it’s just a freaking search box isn’t it?
My response was to pause for a moment in order to consider how I could express to this pre-Internet generation chum what the hell the big deal was. Eventually I responded: Well, I think that search box will come to represent, in a very real way, either human freedom, or a lack thereof. Read More »
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We, as a species, kinda stumbled into this Internet thing. It’s all an inconceivably vast, unregulated, unhindered, unorganized cornucopia of digitized crap, and in order to deal with the fact that humans defecate in digital, we’ve had to invent stuff like Google to help us sift through all the … you get the point. |
The way that we’ve evolved in our mode of seeking information has always been a function of the medium that holds what we’re looking for. Books added indexes, articles added abstracts, and libraries added compilations of indexed abstracts. Categorizable volumes fell prey to the formidable Dewey decimal, the granularity of taxonomy thought un-improvable. But Von Neuman screwd’em, and abstract data types, bubble sorts, relational DBs, non-relational DBs and relevancy algorithms took over the world (rich white men are so passé). Read More »
There was a time when I was a Linux fanboy – dual booting with LILO to a plethora of software options in Windowz, and a plethora of … ummm, different ways to maintain my computer, in Linux. By virtue of my attempts (failed later in life, thankfully) to become a pure geek, I acquired the essential, if adolescent, hatred of all things Microsoft. It was for the right reasons at the time, namely, my genius coder friend swore up and down that M$ couldn’t write a decent compiler (do you see the life from which I narrowly escaped, do you see?). Read More »
In researching (ha, if you can call it that, and I juuuuust did) my latest post, The Problems with Marketing Search, I had a conversation with an old friend of mine who happens to match up pretty well with the profile I consider important to Microsoft right now.
The Bing initiative needs the younger, tech-savvy crowd to accept Bing, embrace it, and most importantly, recommend it via word of mouth, if MS hopes to compete with Google in search. At the end of that post I reference the conversation with the target demographic rep, who we’ll call Non-SE-guy. He’s a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, quite web savvy, the kind of guy people go to when they need help using a computer, or finding something online, but has never worked in the search industry, and even though he knows me, has likely never considered it much of an industry at all.
This is that conversation – if you work for Bing you should read this as if your very job depended upon it. If you work anywhere else, what time is it? Stop reading this junk and go back to work! I just thought it was interesting to see some perspective on search related things without the smudge of the industry all over my lens.
(authors note: proper use of language, grammar and punctuation had, prior to this conversation, been sacrificed to the gods of speed, efficiency and apathy, proportionately in that order.) Read More »
With Google’s personalized search feature bringing a lawsuit to the ‘Plex earlier this month, it begs the question, ummm what Google personalized search? It’s like the old ABC commercials, I can’t see the difference…
Back in early 2007 there were so many boatloads full of buzz about Google integrating more ‘personalized’ results into the index, switching on a feature they called ‘Google Search History’ by default for many searchers. Read More »
UPDATE – When I woke up this morning, after having published this post … ummm, really early this morning, Webmasterworld had to say this, quoting somebody else:
Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
So everything else in this post is now moot… or… maybe waaay more important. You decide (I’m too tired).
Back to your original post:
Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Microsoft has released a new search engine. A year from now, will either of these facts affect your day to day life? The North American search market has had a pair of hands gripped firmly around its gullet ever since Google rose to prominence in the first half of the shiny new, hard to pronounce dates from, decade.
With its hundred million dollar marketing budget, one of the richest companies in the world backing it, and billions of dollars of revenue at stake, is Bing the start of an industry segmentation, of some actual diversity in the search landscape? Meh prolly not, but what do I know? Not much! That’s why I put together a horrifically flawed survey to get to the bottom of the truth barrel! Read More »
That title is a trick, I’m mostly a beginner myself when it comes to multivariate – it was basically beyond my reach before Google decided to eviscerate the proletariat and release Google Website Optimizer tool (GWO) – killing offer all competitors with another amazing free app. Love to hate those guys.
I’d like this to be a follow up to my previous post where I tried to show the essentials of photoshop for beginners, specifically with respect to creating basic layouts for landing pages. It’s really intended for people who need to create (actually be the creative person behind) the landing page elements themselves, even if they can’t do the final design. Read More »
CTR optimization is all about testing. The synergy between the keyphrase someone looks for and the ad that you present them is vital (not forgetting the keyword that triggers the ad in your account, and the space between the search term and searcher intent left by match-type). Read More »
The definition of Quality Score, as provided by Google themselves, seems to almost revolve around this mysterious ineffable quality called relevancy:
“The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.”
There are relevancy factors in your account beyond the ones used to calculate the on-the-fly Quality Score that comes about each time a search triggers an ad auction. In fact, the conspiracy theorist side of my brain Read More »
