Monday, November 18, 2002

Merlin Santana -- who? Until two minutes ago I had never heard of Merlin Santana. But then I opened my weekly email from Lycos, the search company that reports on the top 50 words that are typed into their query box in a given week. Merlin Santana, the Lycos folks tell me, hit #13 on the list. Here's a snip from the Lycos email: "Merlin who?  Merlin Santana played Romeo Santana on the WB network's Steve Harvey Show, and was shot and killed in south Los Angeles last weekend.  So far police have no motive but they do have a female suspect who may have been involved.  The Steve Harvey Show goes from virtually no searches to more queries than Madonna or Survivor: Thailand." Just another inkling of how search engines can tell you fascinating things about society. (And another reminder of out-of-sync I am with the majority of the people on the Net.) 8:51:07 PM    comment []

Words for sale Okay, here's more of the scoop on Search123 and its bidding process, as I understand it. Say you're a credit card company that would love to get more customers (what company wouldn't?). To increase your share of online traffic to your web site, you figure you'll need to show up first, or at least second or third, in any search result listing. It's like putting an advertisement in the yellow pages -- it can make all the difference. With Search123, Overture and other pay-per-click search companies, you can bid for placement in those top search slots. At Search123, specifically, you can bid on packets of keywords. Say there is a packet of keywords that usually are punched in by people looking for credit cards. (Words like "low-interest APR," "low-interest credit card," "no annual fee," etc). You want to make sure that your company comes up highest in the list when a person types those words into the search box. So you sign up with Search123 and make this maximum bid: 30 cents, every single time a person clicks on the link to your company. If you are the top bidder, your site is listed at the top whenever those keywords are punched in. Aside from the issue of whether this corrupts search engines (a highly worthwhile question), there is another interesting aspect. Think about it. Keywords as objects of monetary value. Words for sale. 5:44:58 PM    comment []

	Monday, November 11, 2002

Bidding up keywords The art of the auction has come to Searchville. You may not know it, but deep behind the scenes on many search engines there are myriad bidding wars underway that determine which sites come up first in the search results. Two companies that have perfected this bidding model are Overture and Search123, both of which are bent on commercializing the search space.  I recently talked to the chief executive of Search123, James Beriker, and he explained the bidding process to me. I'll post a boiled-down version tomorrow. 8:03:45 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, November 06, 2002

If I was ever under the illusion that search engines were roads to wisdom, instead of tools of the advertising industry, the folks at PayPerClickAnalyst.com have certainly set me straight. 10:04:31 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, November 05, 2002

SearchDay, a daily feature of Search Engine Watch, just published the results of a new relevancy test for search engines. Google, MSN Search and Yahoo tied for first place, receiving 'A' ratings, with Alltheweb.com just behind them, garnering an 'A-'. And who landed the big fat 'F'? Overture, the company that listens when money talks, putting the sites that pay the most at the top of its search results. Chris Sherman, SearchDay's editor, explains here how the test worked. 1:32:08 PM    comment []

	Monday, October 28, 2002

Why start a blog about search engines when so many other people already write about search and do it so well? Good question. In fact, there are already so many superb search-world resources, that I can hardly keep up. Here are just a few: Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch. Greg Notess's Search Engine Showdown. Gary Price's ResourceShelf. Companies like Alexa, Forrester Research and Terra Lycos are also known for their interesting commentary on the subject. I have no desire to compete with these fine folks. My hope is that I can muse on their findings, and capture a little of the spirit of the searcher, more than the search engine. 4:40:03 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, October 16, 2002

A few weeks ago I had lunch with John Lervik, CEO of Fast Search and Transfer, the company behind alltheweb.com. Alltheweb.com is the consumer show piece for Fast, which is competing with Google for search engine business among big portals like Yahoo and companies like IBM. Sheepishly, I have to admit that I don't test alltheweb.com as much as I should. Like many people I know, I have a tendency to be lazy and stick with Google. But after talking to Dr. Lervik, I'm resolved to give alltheweb.com more of my time. Dr. Lervik talked to me about what he called the third generation of search technology. (Actually, "third generation" isn't just his term -- many search technologists use the same language.) According to this world view, we have already come through two generations of search. The first was fixated on keywords. Crawlers, those little online robots that comb the Web, were designed to find pages that contained the same word that was typed into the query box. The second generation of search tools used what is called "link analysis," in which crawlers not only identified pages with matching keywords but also determined which pages linked to the pages with the matching keywords. The idea was based on the theory of citations -- the more a page was cited, the more likely it was relevant to the searcher. And if a page was cited by an authority (a page that was already ahead of the heap in citations), it was marked as even more useful. Google's PageRank system is best known for this strategy. The third generation, according to Fast, focuses not only on words and not only on citations, but on the meaning behind those words. The theory goes that if a search tool could actually understand the context of a page, instead of simply cataloging the words upon it, it would be all the more intelligent and all the more useful. This is Fast's strategy. I'm still digesting the specifics, the potential impact and how different this may be from other upstart search companies. Come back later for more about the details of their quest. 9:27:20 PM    comment []

	Monday, October 14, 2002

The name change is complete. Now the section is What I'm Searching For. Enjoy. 9:33:20 AM    comment []

	Friday, October 11, 2002

I've started a section called Keywords of the Moment. Maybe I should call it, What I'm Searching For instead. Don't ask me why I've decided to make my searches public. This could set a very embarassing precedent. But if I'm really going to catalog how search engines are changing my life, this has to be part of the process. I mean, geez, the more I look at the keywords I plug into Google, the more I realize how much Google is becoming the source for the most mundane questions that pop into my head. Sometimes it serves as a substitute for the act of swiveling my chair around to face my co-workers cubicles (back in my non-home-office days) and blurting out my need for help. Is this a good thing? 11:55:16 AM    comment []

	Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Welcome to the early days of Keyword Culture. That's my name for this new, yet-to-be-defined era in which the words we type into a search box, the words that are within reach of robotic crawlers, the words that are pulled up in our list of query results, are the words that have the biggest impact. Having the right word is everything. Without it, seekers will never find the pages they are looking for and webmasters will never get their pages noticed by the seekers. Marketing campaigns will languish and consumer retailers will suffer. Iimportant texts will never be unearthed. Questions and answers will pass in the night. Yet when the engines of life are fueled by simple keywords -- nouns and phrases known to all --  something is inevitably lost. What happens to poetry? Where is there room for diversity? What about the electric thrill of hitting upon a new word, a new phrase, to describe what is usually pared down to bare bones cliches? 1:58:06 PM    comment []

	Thursday, September 26, 2002

The buzz is starting on Google's News Service. Google says that it is an operation devoid of human intervention, where automated software determines which headlines get top billing. This editor-less front page will surely raise the hairs on the backs of many traditional journalists. Leslie Walker, the Washington Post's tech columnist, says she's impressed.  Yesterday Scott Rosenberg, Salon.com's Blog monitor extraordinaire, noted some of the early chatter about the service. Some worthwhile criticism comes from Blogster Nick Denton, who says that Google is "no good at picking stories." I'm interested, too, in how this changes the notion of the front page itself. Now that Web news has become part of my life, I sometimes feel like I can skip the front page of the newspaper (since it simply reruns what I've already read on the Web) and instead I go straight for the Op Ed pieces and features (the unique stuff that wasn't plastered all over CNN.com the day before). Will Google's news service further accelerate these changes in my news reading habits? 12:13:19 PM    comment []

	Friday, September 20, 2002

I just finished Emergence by Steven Johnson, the cofounder of the now-departed online magazine FEED. The book jogged my brain, helping me to slip back into a world of interesting theories of information and software (a world that had seemed to be fading in the aftermath of the dot-com crash). Johnson aims to explain how up-and-coming software programs will be built upon models of emergence, where organization and coherence emerge from the bottom, wiggling their way upward instead of being commanded from above. My hope was that Emergence might give me some language for explaining how search engines are making knowledge out of the spray of loose information on the Web. And there were moments in which I thought to myself, hmmm, think of crawlers as software agents that learn as they crawl, using one link to glean information about the next link, and so on, without a central commander telling them what types of information to pick up. Search engine filters take the next "emergent" step, by ranking and indexing those links without any human being providing a blueprint for the kinds of pages that should receive top billing. But although the concept is fun to play with intellectually, I'm not convinced that it applies as neatly as I'd like. At what point are the rules (written by humans) doing more of the guiding than the agents (the software robots) themselves? Worth pondering as I consider how much artificial intelligence is making its way into search-engine territory. 3:48:22 PM    comment []

	Thursday, August 15, 2002

I'm finally entering Blogland. After years of glancing at it from the safe and anonymous perspective of a curious observer, I've decided to step over the windowsill and test the grasses myself. There are many good reasons why I shouldn't. For one, I'm a reporter. Everything I write could be scrutinized for bias. Everything I write should be scrutinized for bias. Two, I'm a new mother, with a four-month-old daughter. Why I would want to enter into the time-sucking realm of a personal online journal is a very good question. But something pulls me here. I've been looking for a way to organize my thoughts about the things that interest me -- particularly the intersection of technology and knowledge gathering -- and this log seems like a good way to keep me disciplined while attempting to be creative. We'll give it a shot. 11:01:58 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Guernsey. Last update: 11/18/2002; 8:51:43 PM.