An interview with SurfCanyon

That title is a doozy, but it does exist! I recently had the extreme pleasure of meeting the gang at SurfCanyon, one VERY personal search engine (and FF add on). I was first turned onto this groovy tool more than a year ago and it was a thrill to hear from them. When it comes to personalization (and social search even) these folks really do take it to a new level. If you haven't already, be sure to give it a try (search engine here and FireFox add on here)

The following is an interview that sprang from those chats. (more on SurfCanyon at the end).

Enjoy!

Are we there yet?

I thought we could spend a few moments looking at the value, potential and implications for the world of (real time and) social search. I prefer to think of them as;

• Social search – using explicit elements (voting, annotating) in conjunction with standard search functionality.
• Real Time Search – searching the fire-hose of the social world (Twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed and so on)

But for the sake of this post, we’ll just go with RTSS (real time social search) to make things easier. While I personally believe there is a need for distinction, it would make things messy for this simple journey. For starters, a few examples….

Explicit data; Social Search

The Fire-hose; Real time search

While people tend to not make the distinction between social and real-time search, it is certainly important from an SEO standpoint, to do so. Now we have some associations in place, let’s look at the present state of affairs (from an IR standpoint).

Once upon a time me and a few cohorts wondered about just what levels of flux there were in the Google SERPs. Has personalized search really changed the consistency of rankings? It’s an issue that has been spoken about many times in the search world. We set out to see what was up. After two rounds of research we noticed that this was unlikely to be the case. You can learn more in the post; The SEO guide to Google personalized search

It seemed only sensible, given Google’s Psearch expansion, to have another look. And so last December we started a third round. Has anything changed? How much flux is out there? Well, read on and find out what we’re seeing so far…

Now, first things first; the goal wasn’t really to establish how personalized search operates. What we really wanted to know is how much movement is there in the SERPs for a given query type, in a given region (USA in this case). Yes we’re also noting some potential personalized search affects, but movement/flux was the core observation.

We must understand that even though there is some interesting data here, it is by no means a large enough sample to get nitty gritty with IMHO. It is also important to remember this is a specific task from a quasi-transactional query session (task development).

We want to go back and do more from an informational query space and one more suited to respondents (familiar, such as ‘learn SEO’ etc..). This approach, last time out, did show more movement than we saw with this space (we’ve done this round 2x now). 

As always, no magic bullets here… Just more links in the chain (pun intended of course).

(the following is a guest post from Mark Thompson)

Duplicate content and plagiarism can be an easy way for a website to get penalized by the search engines or possibly banned (ED; in extreme cases). The search engines have gotten much better at being able to check for duplicate content. If you are interested, here is what Google has to say about duplicate content. For website owners, bloggers, and writers there are a number of tools you can use to identify duplicate content.

This post will talk discuss tools used to identify plagiarism, how to deal with duplicate content and what limitations there are for having duplicate content on your site.