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"Any clue as to the possible role greater reliance on semantics is playing in your never ending quest for more relevant results?"
I'd say that's inevitable over time. The goal of a good search engine should be both to understand what a document is really about, and to understand (from a very short query) what a user really wants. And then match those things as well as possible. :) Better semantic understanding helps with both those prerequisites and makes the matching easier.
So a good example is stemming. Stemming is basically SEO-neutral, because spammers can create doorway pages with word variants almost as easily as they can to optimize for a single phrase (maybe it's a bit harder to fake realistic doorways now, come to think of it). But webmasters who never think about search engines don't bother to include word variants--they just write whatever natural text they would normally write. Stemming allows us to pull in more good documents that are near-matches. The example I like is [cert advisory]. We can give more weight to www.cert.org/advisories/ because the page has both "advisory" and "advisories" on the page, and "advisories" in the url. Standard stemming isn't necessarily a win for quality, so we took a while and found a way to do it better.
So yes, I think semantics and document/query understanding will be more important in the future. pavlin, I hope that partly answers the second of the two questions that you posted way up near the start of this thread. If not, please ask it again in case I didn't understand it correctly the first time. :)
This is the first big update that I've been through. Does GG let us know when it's done?
Aol.co.uk is still showing 64 - results are good here.
Hi Sloney,
Still 216 where I'm sitting in Yorkshire ;)
Best wishes
Sid
I've been checking on and off constantly since yesterday morning.
I'm still seeing the older results through www :(
Cyprus.
Google needs to step back and look at what they were producing and what they are now producing.
With MSN and Yahoo coming soon, they better concentrate on what is important. Retaining searchers, not driving them away with mediocre results.
[edited by: Marcia at 5:43 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2004]
just a thought ..
under the 64** and GG's way of thinking ...."yahoo" would be considered by "google" to better deserve # 1 slot in a search return on "google" for the term "search engine" ....it should even get # 1 for search term "google".....( one's got loads of information rich text on its start page and links back to the search term and the url of "google"...the other is basically just a logo ) .......;)
I wouldn't feel so bad if I knew that while shooting me down you shot yourselves in the foot guys ;))
I run a number of small sites 15 - 30 pages and pre-Austin the interior pages of these sites always did well. We rode the Florida update reasonably well but Austin was hard for certain industries.
With Brandy it looks like we're back in for our main search phrases site-wide but only the index is being presented when an interior page would be more relevant. Not as good for the user I would have thought?
