The other day I had mentioned to a cohort that it had been a while since I added new pics of the family to the personal section of the ol Blog… Now that warm weather has finally arrived here in the Great White North (eh) – yesterday was a great excuse to get out.
For those that don’t know, we left the city life back when our daughter was born some 7 ½ years ago and now live a peaceful small town lifestyle. As you’d expect in Canada, we have a Maple Festival each year that includes street festival activities on the main strip and more on the local maple farm…fun for the whole family!
To give you an idea of the size of our town, there is maybe 20 stores and not a single set of stop lights… a couple of stop signs…and that’s it…. population around 3000...
Take a ride with me
We started off downtown making sure to get our new hats to ensure we aren’t mistaken as tourists… the red neck doesn’t start showing until the mosquitoes get worse… he he…
Recently I have been engaging a few of my industry cohorts on the topic of social search engines and the future of search in general. In the coming weeks I will be publishing some of these discussions which for me lead to some hybrid of algorithmic, performance metric based and human enhanced ranking signals.
One of the problems facing those that believe in a pure social powered search engine is the fact that over time, once the novelty wears off, many users will be less inclined to actively be involved and so the few (in the form of power users) would be creating indexes/SERPs for the many. One way of dealing with this (and spam) would be to have a form of personalized (trusted) network search approach… But how do you make creating networks and accessing ranking signal easier? Yahoo seems to have a plan.
In a patent I came across yesterday, I would seem the folks at Yahoo! are looking to address such shortcomings in a personalized/social search sphere.
Ok... now this is a totally groovy idea baby! This is one of those ad campaigns that makes me wish I'd thought of it first. Very nice work....watch the video and tell me...is dat da bomb or whaat?
Once upon a time there was a mystical magical land called Social Networking 1.0; or as us old folks like to call them – forums. It was a wonderful place where you could not only meet up with other professional SEOs, but webmasters and curious onlookers alike. They could be engaging, enlightening, frustrating and fun; often quite consuming. But, for a young SEO practitioner, there is also a hidden value to remember that is potentially important to your future.
I don’t get out to the boards as much as I did a few years ago, but like many SEOs, countless hours have been consumed within them. True to my moniker, theGypsy, I have bopped around a lot and have accounts in more locales than I can remember (right Able?). While reflecting upon what I enjoy about that social format, a few things seemed truly important for the new generation of SEOs; important aspects of being an SEO forum fly that can be help your growth;
In my travels this morning I cam across a website that got me thinking. Specifically, I was thinking of what types of honey pots the fine folks at Google might set up to help them in their quest to squash the paid links industry. I mean people are not always the brightest when it comes to buying them; to that end I give you The Social Millionaire.
This site, that John Chow reviewed (and didn’t nofollow links to, duh), and describes as; “a site that tries combine the appeal of social networks with the goal of raising one million dollars.” – is another million dollar pixel game that essentially sells you a link. This is simply easy hunting for the fine folks at Google as the links do not have the ever popular ‘nofollow’ attribute.
Personalized Search and User Performance Metrics - back in the news
Recently Danny (Sullivan) mentioned Google and the use of performance metrics, which I thought worth discussing.
In his keynote, wonderfully covered by Kalena, he was talking about his vision of Search 4.0 and how personalized search finds its way into the mix. Also of note, the other day Danny was reporting on the keynote interview and Marissa Mayer’s talk about ‘Previous Query’ ranking signals coming to the regular index search (not merely AdServing). Personalized search is built upon the concepts that your actions can teach a search engine to better predict your likes and dislikes. Taken on a larger scale, it stands to reason that ranking signals for the regular index can also be mined.
Now what is all this Gobble-D-gook and why do I care? Because it is important.
One of the problems facing those that believe in a pure social powered search engine is the fact that over time, once the novelty wears off, many users will be less inclined to actively be involved and so the few (in the form of power users) would be creating indexes/SERPs for the many. One way of dealing with this (and spam) would be to have a form of personalized (trusted) network search approach… But how do you make creating networks and accessing ranking signal easier? Yahoo seems to have a plan.
In his keynote, 
