Beta FAST Topics

[jimmykav]

Anyone seen the new layout at the top of the SERPs?
There is an box with categories relating to the search term.
There may also be a news SERP as the first result.

[heini]

Jimmy
itīs one of the new features of Alltheweb, gone live yesterday - discussed also here http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum4/344.htm [webmasterworld.com]
The topic grouping is done along the lines of ODP categorization.
Those features will eventually be picked up by Fastīs outlets.

[Ove]

Hi

Iam a little bit confused about Beta FAST Topics:

A clients site there is no title on it and there is no odp listing and the site is not crawled after i have done a SEO

But when i search for the kw`s i got a first place in Beta FAST Topics: Where comes the results from?
i think its strange but there is a lot of thing that is strange

/Ove

[heini]

Quote from Fastīs help page:

Use this set (odp cats)as a training set for classification, i.e. based on the documents in the existing hierarchy, add more documents from the web using document similarity between these and those already classified.
Generate new groups (clusters) for those new documents that cannot be matched properly and use key terms from the documents within this group to label it.

So itīs quite likely for pages not listed in odp to turn up at Fast topis. Why anyhow a site turns up, that is not in the regular webpages index is beyond me.

[lazerzubb]

Wouldn't be great if Alltheweb started to use DMOZ data :)

[heini]

Lazerzubb, actually they are using ODP data. Look at the righthand bottom of the page and youīll see that little dragon/alligator/whatever running.

[lazerzubb]

Ye but how much does it do for your ranking?
You should also be able to see the directory like on Google, but it's always a start.

[IanTurner]

My look at things is that some sites from ODP are in topics but not all!

Why are some omitted?

Are fst using old ODP data? I have seen this before where some search facilities use old ODP data, but they tend to be those who do things on the cheap - this is not what I would expect from Fast.

[seoboy]

maybe FAST is just using ODP categories for organization, but not necessarily crawling ODP listings. in other words, maybe they set up a list of ODP categories and sites therein, and then map their crawled database against that list to categorize sites they have (ie. *already* crawled by FAST) which are also already in the ODP. this could provide the basic FAST categories - a map of FAST sites over ODP categories.

they could then run a "similarity" algorithm across sites in each category, to find other sites in the FAST index which are similar to those sites in any given category, but not already included in that category via the ODP. then they'd add those sites to their version of the category.

thing to remember is that these calculations must be done in advance, with the categories cached. there's no way they'd be able to run the calculations on the fly, across the entire database.

you'd think they'd go ahead and crawl ODP, but who knows with the PFI stuff going on. maybe they only want to crawl submitted stuff...

anyway, our stuff that is in FAST but not in ODP seems to be categorized pretty well; and you seem to be able to find the pages in multiple categories too...

seoboy

[IanTurner]

Wonder what Cat FAST has given me - it sure doesn't relate to my ODP listing.