Google Reveals 10 Tweaks To Search Algorithm: What's Changed?

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By Jon Mitchell / November 14, 2011 10:30 AM 

 

Google revealed 10 recent changes to its search algorithm today, including one to favor "fresher" results over older content in certain situations. Detection of "official" sites or pages has also improved. Other updates improve search snippets and page titles, as well as info retrieval across languages, among other tweaks.

In addition to the algorithm itself, Google has changed features of the search interface recently. It eliminated the "Timeline" view of results to organize them by date range, and it has integrated Google+ social content in a variety of ways.

Changes Affecting Page Content
Google continues to improve rich snippets and learn how to pull relevant page content into search results. Recent updates make Google smarter about pulling page body content, rather than header or menu content. Others improve page titles by de-duplicating anchor text in links, and improve details in rich snippets for applications.

Google has also retired a signal for image search that looked for images referred to by multiple documents around the Web. Another change improves detection of which pages are "official" for a topic or brand.

Changes To Time-Sensitive Results
Google is making a concerted effort to shift from basic chronological results to real-time search. Its recent updates to the Caffeine search infrastructure semantically determine when a user would want recent, "fresh" results instead of the all-time ranked pages. For example, it may determine that users searching for "olympics" are more likely to want results about the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics than the Wikipedia page for the Olympic Games.

By eliminating the "Timeline" view and applying "freshness" adjustments to queries with specified date ranges, Google is pushing timeliness as a new priority in how it determines relevance.



Google is also improving "freshness" signals by incorporating Google+ activity into overall search. After its real-time search deal with Twitter expired this year, it needs new signals for what's currently trending. Google+ offers just such an opportunity, and Google is trying out real-time search within the social network.

Other Search Changes
Several recent tweaks to Google search improve cross-language results, using Google's powerful translation to retrieve content for searches in languages that have limited Web content. Another improves query auto-completion in Russian, which used to produce some arbitrary and unhelpful predictions.

To see the rest of Google's bullet-point search improvements, visit the Inside Search blog.

Is it time for a content strategy maturity model?

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November 14, 2011 

Rahel A. Bailie

Many of us are familiar with the concept of maturity models. (We’ll ignore, for now, that maturity models come up most often when someone wants to tell us we’re trying to accomplish something the wrong way.) From Carnegie Mellon’s capability maturity model, an approach to improving software development processes, to the information maturity model from MIKE2.0, which focuses on the maturity of data management, to the information process maturity model from the Information Management Center, we’ve seen enough development of content development processes to be able to make certain predictions.

Maturity models are a gauge for how developed an industry is, how established and repeatable their processes are, and how much the processes look at the future, at expansion, and strategic development. Hmmm, sound a lot like content strategy?  I posit, then, that the field of content strategy is ready for its own maturity model. It’s been around for over a decade now – in fact, we’ll see the second edition of Ann Rockley’s seminal work, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, hit the bookstores in the not-too-distance future – and we’re starting to see variations of content strategy come together into a multi-modal discipline that crosses organzational silos.

What, then, could a content strategy maturity model look like? Here’s one way of viewing such a model:


I’m very interested in feedback from practitioners. Your thoughts?

Comments

1. rahelab on November 14th, 2011 9:03 am
   I’m not the first person to think of this. A quick search turned up eBay’s presentation at Congility 2011 on multilingual content strategies that included that very topic: http://www.congility.com/images/downloads/eventslides/2011conference/T1/Lucie_Hyde_Nikki_Tiedtke_Congility2011.pdf. I think we’re both in the same ballpark.

Razorfish Outlook Report, Fall '11

This is a great collection of articles about the future of digital--enjoy!

Outlook Report, Vol 10 — There’s no better time to start something.by Bob Lord

The Year in Mediaby The Razorfish Media Team
with Thomas Sudassy

Forget Mobile —
Think Multiscreenby Jeremy Lockhorn

A Wake-Up Call For Collaborationby Pete Stein
with Frederic Bonn

It's Time for Big Data
to improve customer experienceby Mark Taylor with
Pradeep Ananthapadmanabhan
and Marc Sanford

Humanity Check —
What Consumers Really Think About Techby Brandon Geary

How the Social Cloud
Can Accelerate Brand Interactionby Ray Velez
with Rafi Jacoby

Beyond the Banner — Unleashing the Power
of Digital to Drive
Topline Growthby Tim Perlstein
with Bethany Fenton

The Rules of Gamificationby The Team at Denuo

It’s Not Enough to Be
Liked — Getting Serious
About Socialby Chris Bowler

Controlling the Retail Environment Through Digital Brand Immersionby Jonathan Hull

Performance Marketing Must Dieby Adam Heimlich

Toward a New Global Digital Agency Structureby Ken Hong
with William Lidstone

Limited Time to Prepare
for Unlimited Potential
of Mobileby Paul Gelb

How the Open API Movement Can Help Your Brandby Salim Hemdani
with Basel Salloum

Organizing for
Digital Successby Tim Perlstein
and Bethany Fenton

Avoiding a Crash When the Holiday Hordes Attack

By Peter Melerud
E-Commerce Times
11/08/11 8:00 AM PT 

For an e-commerce business, slow website performance or downtime is a costly proposition. This is true for any time of year, but especially during the holiday season. Last year alone, Cyber Monday sales topped $1 billion -- with hundreds of millions of dollars more online transactions crossing the Web in December. Here are some tips for avoiding downtime when the customer surge comes.

The countdown to Cyber Monday has begun. Is your online business ready for the holiday shopping spree?

We're all too familiar with sluggish online shopping experiences that have left us frustrated or caused us to leave the site altogether before we've completed a transaction. As the holiday shopping season looms, businesses can't afford to have their websites slow down, or worse yet, taken down by traffic overload. But when user traffic spikes, servers can be taxed by compute-intensive SSL transactions, large data file requests and memory overloads. When customers can't access your site or experience long waits, your business can suffer and revenues lost (at least for a time).

During the holiday season in particular, slow website performance or downtime is a costly proposition. Last year alone, Cyber Monday sales topped US$1 billion -- with hundreds of millions of dollars more online transactions crossing the Web in December. How costly would it be to your business if your site crashed this holiday season? Network downtime is equivalent to shutting your store-front to customers.
 

Some businesses grappling with the prospect of high-volume traffic simply throw more hardware at the problem. However, this is not always the best strategy when traffic isn't properly directed to the best performing resource. Nor is it economical for many businesses.

So how can you ensure Web uptime and speed this holiday season and optimize datacenter equipment -- while keeping costs to a minimum? Below are some best practices for maintaining high performance and accessibility.

1. Know What Your Systems Can Handle: Have you tested your servers to ensure they can handle heavy traffic -- especially during peak times and days during the holiday season? If not, find out if your system can cope with sudden spikes in traffic, and compare that to projections for your peak usage, always leaving plenty of room for error. Having this information can go a long way toward helping to figure out when and where to place resources. Remember that the more you know, the better prepared you will be to deal with the unknown.
   
2. Keep Website Traffic Flowing: The challenges of addressing high availability and speed of access for customers can be solved with application delivery controllers (ADC)/server load balancer technology. These devices are able to monitor heavy traffic loads on busy servers and re-route the data to best-performing servers, preventing crashes and keeping traffic flowing. Many ADCs are equipped with added features, such as SSL acceleration, caching and compression, which can offload server-processor-intensive operations and further enable the control and management of traffic crossing through the system.
   
   For businesses that do not have the budgets to add to their server farms, ADCs are the most cost-effective way to maintain high performance and availability of existing Web application infrastructure.
   
3. Secure and Accelerate Your Customers' Transactions (and Your Revenues): E-commerce sites often use SSL to encrypt and secure shoppers' transactions -- a CPU-intensive process that can quickly deplete a server's resources. ADC devices include SSL accelerators that remove the workload off of servers and place the burden on the ADC, delivering increased throughput and SSL transaction processing.  
4. Advanced ADCs now offer support for 2,048-bit SSL keys, which provide for greater encryption strength as compare to 1024-bit keys. This increase in SSL performance cost-effectively provides customers with improved performance and quicker response time for encrypted applications such as e-commerce applications where a website can be inundated with shopper traffic.
5.  
6. Make Your Site and Your Customers "Sticky":Persistence is a key factor in keeping your visitors happy. Look at the online shopping cart to understand the importance of persistence, or site "stickiness." 
   The "cart" holds data that reside on the server to which the customer first connected, which also served content during the session. If at any point during the session the customer is switched to a server that does not contain shopping cart data for that user, the shopping cart will be lost -- as well as the sale. ADCs that operate at Layer 7 are able to recognize returning users and route them back to the same server on which their information is stored, providing for a smooth shopping experience.
   
7. Keep Your Site Fail-proof: What would happen to a site if one of the servers becomes inaccessible? ADCs perform automatic health checking on the servers and applications and take a server offline if it has been deemed unresponsive or fails, automatically re-routing shoppers to other functioning servers. This process is essentially seamless (but critical) to customers. Since all inbound traffic passes through the ADC, should the ADC itself fail, the server farm and site can be taken down. For this reason, ADCs can be deployed in a redundant, high availability (HA) configuration to ensure website uptime.

Spikes in traffic -- not only during holiday season but at other times during the day, week, month or year -- necessitate a strategy to keep your e-commerce site up and running (and your customers satisfied with their online shopping experiences).

As businesses collect, store and access more and more data, servers are being asked to take on more and heavier data loads, and we will have to find creative and cost-effective ways to ensure uptime and speed. By planning for traffic needs to ensure proper traffic management and optimize web performance, you can stay ahead of the curve - keeping traffic flowing not only during the holiday season but also for years to come.

3 in 10 Consumers Lack QR Code Understanding

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October 7, 2011

inShare0

A high number of US consumers demonstrate a significant lack of understanding as to what QR codes are or how they work, according to an October 2011 survey from strategic marketing firm Russell Herder. Results from “The QR Question” indicate 72% of consumers say they have seen a QR code, but nearly 30% do not know what it is.


In addition, nearly one in five consumers who regularly use the internet via mobile phone do not know what a QR code is.

Consumers age 18-24 have the highest rate of having seen a QR code (more than 75%), while those age 25-34 and 35-44 both have seen a QR code at a rate almost the same as the overall average. Interestingly, a slightly higher percentage of consumers age 55 and up report having seen a QR code than those 45-54.

3 in 10 Multiple QR Code Scanners Say Time Was Worth It

Nearly four in five of those who have scanned a QR code have done so more than once. Perhaps more importantly, however, only 31% report that what they receive in return is always or usually worth their time.

The largest portion of consumers who have scanned more than one QR code (52%) say it is sometimes worth it, while a combined 17% say it is rarely or never worth the time spent.

Younger Mobile Users Scan More

Consumers who have seen a QR code, know what it is and have scanned one with their mobile device tend to be younger (ages 18-34), male and regularly go online via their phone. More than 23% of mobile phone owners age 18-24 have scanned a QR code, roughly 50% more than the slightly more than 15% of overall mobile phone owners who have done so. Mobile phone owners age 25-34 also overrepresent in having scanned a QR code.

Mobile phone owners age 35 and up all underrepresent in having scanned a QR code with their device, with an almost negligible rate among those in the 55-plus bracket.

It is also worth noting that among people who know what a QR code is, and own a mobile device that is capable of going online, 54 percent say they are likely to scan one.

comScore: QR Code Scanners Skew Young, Male, Wealthy

In June 2011, 14 million mobile users in the US, representing 6.2% of the total mobile audience, scanned a QR (quick response) code on their mobile device, according to an August 2011 study released by comScore MobiLens. The study found that a mobile user that scanned a QR code during the month was more likely to be male (60.5% of code scanning audience), skew toward ages 18-34 (53.4%) and have a household income of $100,000 or above (36.1%).

In addition, 18-to-24-year-olds were 36% more likely than average to scan a QR code with a mobile device, and those with a household income of $75,000 but less than $100,000 were 18.6% more likely than average to scan QR codes.

About the Data: Russell Herder conducted an online survey of more than 500 US residents in August 2011 to gain insight into awareness levels of QR codes and attitudes towards their use among consumers.