Today’s link roundup: a week of Battelle links, new text search algorithm for Google. Google health?, Keyword volume data, Gary Flake, MSN search down, MSN master of the obvious?
John Battelle’s Friday Update
Link roundup from John Battelle.
Google gets new text search algorithm
“Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant. The results of the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website - although there is still that option.”
SearchEngineWatch comments
Local news article
WebMaster World comments
Google Health, maybe
“Health has been an area of interest at Google for some time. We (including Adam) have been doing a variety of research in this area, including how to improve the quality of health-related search results.”
Keyword search volume data
“SEO Question: Are you aware of a tool or a service that can provide reliable search volume history for certain keywords? Like how many searches there were for “keyword phrase” in each month of 2005.”
A Frank Interview with Gary Flake
“The format is simple - I send an opening question to the luminary in question via email, they respond, and we go from there. First up is Gary Flake, a veteran of Overture, Yahoo and now Microsoft’s vaunted research labs (he’s founder and director of the new “Live Labs.”) Gary and I have known each other since I first began work on the book, and he’s always had a refreshingly frank outlook. I expected that to be tempered by a year at the world’s largest (and oft-criticized) software company, but I was wrong. If anything, Gary has become more outspoken. I’ve bolded the really juicy bits, but see for yourself….”
MSN Search down for four hours
“Microsoft spokesman said the outage began at about 8 a.m. Pacific time. At noon, the service was still down, but shortly afterward began working again.
The spokesman said company technicians have been working on the problem, but have not yet concluded what caused the shutdown in the first place.”
MSN, master of the obvious?
“Well, it turns out if you have clearly computer generated content with exactly the same number of links on each page, all pages the same size and over a million pages from 116,654 hosts that all share the same IP, they can detect you. Wow! That’s some pretty sophisticated spam detection technology they’ve got there.
In addition, this revolutionary new search technology can detect:
1. Corn in Nebraska
2. If a politician is lying”