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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. :)
If 64. is the update, can we discuss that - or are people disputing that this data centre is (or will be) the update. If you are - then it is not an update. Could I suggest you discuss elsewhere (in the nicest possible way).
I will reintroduce something I wanted to discuss a couple of threads ago.
Brandy appears to have reduced the criteria needed to qualify as an "authority" site - however, authority sites still rule the roost for a pre-ponderance of commercial search terms - but the level of "status" needed to be considered for authority status varies on the type of search made - and in some areas, does not exist.
Seriously, most long-term members ignore these threads, they slither off track so fast they aren't worth having a discussion in.
Exceptions are the "Google is always great and never makes mistakes" sycophants and the "Google always sucks" fanatics - but these are limited to only a couple of dedicated posters who are also long-term members.
It would be nice to see serious discussion again.
[edited by: makemetop at 8:32 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2004]
Pre-Brandy: 3
64.x.x.x: 1
216.x.x.x: 1
Current www: 5
I'm in Southern California too, and our www hasn't updated to the 216 nor the 64 yet - we've actually dropped two spots to number 5.
As a user and a webmaster, I'd hope the google maintained the high quality of pages indexed. Honestly, when we know what we're looking for, it's not that hard to find on google.
Normal users will eventually learn about search flags and modifiers, broad vs. exact, etc. I feel out of all the major SEs, Goggle currently does the best job.
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.
Until you can read searchers minds, good luck. Give categorization a try.
Exceptions are the "Google is always great and never makes mistakes" sycophants and the "Google always sucks" fanatics - but these are limited to only a couple of dedicated posters who are also long-term members.It would be nice to see serious discussion again.
Since when does flaming members who don't agree with you qualify as "serious discussion"?
If you type in the search for a two word phrase, with the second word having two possible suffixes, if version-1 is what's on the page and version-2 is what you searched for it'll come up with the page with the version-1 phrase (what's on the page) highlighted just as though it were version-2.
i can see a lot of search results for "some thing" where none of the word "things" is highlited despite of presence. This happens with both cases - very competitive keywords and not.
More over, some SERPS show results without any stemmed words at all! It surprises me greatly because some authority guys say that today stemming plays a great role in Google search results.
BTW, what are the basic rules of the Google stemming? What words from the following list are counted like the same one's?
1. form (verb)
2. form (noun)
3. forms (verb)
4. froms (noun)
5. formed
6. forming
7. former
8. reform (verb)
9. reform (noun)
10. formation
..
etc
Just my take on the whole thing.
We also know that it will be rolling out gradually so we will all be seeing different things at different times until it fully propogates. There is no longer any need for blow-by-blows, which will avail us nothing. It's a done deal and it's time to move on.
So let's have some throughtful discussion on what it is we're seeing - not numbers, but some serious evaluation, which is what a lot of our people are hopefully here for.
Now if the sites offered localized content, specific languages or specializing in specific fields or offering discounted merchandise start thinking a bit more about visitors than their own profit, They will provide more informational and educational contents in their secific fields.
After all, the most honest business practice is to educate your prospective client on the pros and cons of your goods and services and then sell to them.
[edited by: DigiSEO at 9:33 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2004]
It's always been this way I guess, but it seems extraneous. I know that when I see two results from the same site, I'll click one and ignore the other. I drool to think how far up a couple of my pages would be if some of the double results would consolidate.
I just wanted to also point out we do not sell anything on our website, these are just my thoughts.
