NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

This is so true:

Shame there is so much ’snake oil’ at the moment, because there are good bits in social and once you understand the core of social i.e. relationships and shared experience, then it all makes sense. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about then this Youtube video will enlighten you: (This one is not actually a joke)

I think we need some warm bodies

A quick post…Some time ago I wrote a post with a pdf link to the leaked Google human reviewer document written in 2007. As some of you may know there has been a little more ‘openess’ in the big G and following that theme, this article gives great insight into how they use humans to augment the algo.

A few nice quotes:

Q: Can you give me a sense for how you approach evaluation?

A: We use two main kinds of evaluation data. One kind is we have human evaluators all over the world for whom we have a workflow system. They come to it and are fed things to evaluate. A typical thing is: Here is a query, you’re speaking French in Switzerland, here’s a URL, tell us on some kind of scale or some set of flags and description how good of a URL is that for that query.

Q: Who are these human raters?

A: They’re not volunteers. They’re paid, through contractors from third parties. We look for a basic level of education and communication skills, and in particular our one requirement is that they need to be able to some level in English. Other than that, what we’re really looking for is a broad cross-section of folks. Not a technology background, just like to use the Internet. We have some screening around testing of their ability to do some of the tasks we want them to do and follow the instructions.

Q: How important are the human raters vs. the more automated methods? And do you get alerts if search results or search behavior is not what you expect?

A: The human evaluators are pretty important for us today. The more automated or user behavior/click-based things really give you complementary kinds of data. Both have noise in them: Human evaluators make mistakes. Clicks are hard to interpret; people click or don’t click for all kinds of reasons.

It’s well worth taking some time out to trawl through this lot since it will give you a much better idea of how Google uses humans to help it’s search engine.

Hmm, thats interesting Teddie

I was on a speaking gig the other night and the title of the talk was ‘Search is Dead, Long Live Search‘. So I was up with:
Ciarán Norris – Head of Social Marketing & Director, Invention at MindShare (social media)
Teddie Cowell – SEO Director, Guava (SEO agency)
William Tunstall-Pedoe – CEO & Founder, True Knowledge
Alan Patrick – Consultant,Broadsight
CHAIR: Jon Myers – Head of Search / Associate Director, MediaVest

I've got something important to say!

My big theme was around how Caffeine ( yes that one again ) is going to change the landscape where spamming is going to get tougher and tougher. Along with that will come the split out between:

- Boring commercial brand owned stuff that users don’t particularly want to look (you pay for prominence via PPC)

- Interesting stuff written by individuals about those boring brands, where they help makes sense of what is the best consumer wise. (you have to have something interesting to say & be on the consumer side as a brand)

For anyone not familiar with the BIG idea, it comes from a site called cluetrain.com where they say ‘markets are conversations’. Think of amazon and its reviews, then think ‘web wide’ where forums and ‘real conversations’ happen and imagine Google filtering the results so you get those ‘conversations’.

An interesting screen grab:

Its that red box!

So from trying a few searches, the multi links are still generally at the bottom of the page, but assuming users like this stuff, you will see that block rising and you will see stuff like this crowd out the ranking where the ‘brand sites’ used to live.

If you think its my imagination, check this post on the google glog talking about this new kind of forum block.

On the general theme of the commercial index being eroded by informational listings, check this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=casino

(screengrab below)

It's the red box again!

To wrap up:

Here is my message from the Chinwag night. “If you are a boring brand, or not that clever with ’social engineering’ I.e. creating a footprint so Google thinks your site is important to their users – then you will pay dearly through PPC. ”

And lest you forget, Google is a public company and so is only interested in sustainable maximisation of profits.

By the way, I do think there is a BIG future for SEO with Google, but it will take a very different route than the hack/spam route we hear so much about. And honestly I’m only beginning to really figure it out. [Read more →]

Infamy at last

I did a very time consuming powerpoint presentation for wordcamp UK on seo for wordpress, where I went through all the best plugins I have used over the years for SEO.

I’m glad to say it’s been picked up by an SEO guy in Malaysia who give my PPT some praise – so thanks for the respect Ruhan

The post with my PPT on SEO for wordpress

Tweetmeme - very addictive

I was at a gathering of Twitter’ites orbiting around Jeff Pulver a substantial investor in Twitter and had the pleasure of briefly meeting Sarah Blow the person responsible for community on Tweetmeme.com.

They say:

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

I’m glad I did meet her, since I’m now a fan of this amazing new site. I guess its a bit like Techmeme in that its not about users directly voting for stuff, but to me it’s a bit like Digg (but far better) because its about twitterers just doing whatever they do and tweetmeme picking up their output and organising it, i.e. the vote is a by product of normal activity, leading to a far better gauge of sentiment.

The problem is that sites like Digg and Reddit are user submitted content which are voted upon, with some algo filtering and some human filtering. Its the human stuff that causes problems since you get into the area of qualitative judgement on what is good. So you often end up with news sources on Digg being banned for some random reason and so there ends up a covert form of censorship. In other words popular is not necessarily represented on Digg or Reddit.

So I will be using this site along with Reddit for my ‘meme’ fix and I think you should too.

BTW an interesting article that echoes my feelings on Digg: http://www.searchandsocial.com/seo-blog/decline-of-digg/