Keywords are not the only thing that makes a page findable

Photo by Sarah Ziegler

Many people believe that keywords are the best way of making content easier to find. While there is some truth to this, it is pretty evident that as semantic search grows, the power of keywords in relation to other influencers diminishes. In short, in the current day, the power of keywords does not always provide the best way of making a piece of content findable. As I continue my path down of translating ideas from David's book to apply to internal enterprise search, I realize more and more that this basic concept is especially true for enterprise search.

Let's dig a little bit. It is a guarantee that when semantic search is involved, the search query always contains words which are not declared keywords on some of the pages returned in the search results. Instead these words come from other locations, from the content itself, from the comments on the content page, from social media that references the page. In addition, if the content or the page supports the ability to rate or like the content, these items can definitely influence the search results.

For employees to truly benefit from semantic in the enterprise, helping them to find the information they are looking for, social capabilities start to really have a huge influence that can't be ignored. While keywords might help, the content of the page, being written well, using the correct nomenclature on the page and allowing people to interact with the content in as many ways as possible becomes a very important factor.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2056

I wonder ... Enterprise profile photos in search results

Photo by Eric Ziegler

I know that google has gone away from authorship and providing image previews, but I still wonder if there is some value in providing an image of the authori/authors next to search results. I believe that there is some serious value in the enterprise of showing all authors of a document or a piece of content, so people know who all contributed to the content.

I wonder if there could be some sort of UI design that would provide images of the authors in certain instances (they are authorities on a subject in the enterprise?) and not show the author images in the search results for when they are not the recognized authority on a topic.  Similar to my last post, this technique would most likely drive people to the "higher authority" content.

The only thing that puts some level of doubt into my mind is the changes that Google recently did to their search results. I wonder if they found that the pictures did not add that much to how people found the content they were looking for. I wonder if they determined that having those images did not improve the "trust" that people had for the content.  If that is the case, I wonder if providing profile photos next to the search results would increase or decrease the trust people had related to the content.  

I wonder...

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Images, previews and search results - how to attract bees to honey

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Much of the content in an enterprise intranet is documents. Documents of procedures, project plans, division and department policies, design document to, legal documents, etc. In fact this type of content completely overwhelms the content found related to corporate news, corporate communications and corporate policies. So how do you attract people to the content that is more important?

When people search for content, all content in the search results are not made equal and different techniques should be used to attract people to the content. One method is to provide an image or snippet of the actual content in the search results. Through semantic search, search should be able to determine which results should have an image, based on the quality of the snippet and the relative importance of the content. This technique means that not all search results would have an image snippet but rather a subset of the search results.

The two reasons why I came up with restricting images in the search results include:

1. By only providing images for some content, the search engine can help drive people to specific content. For example, content that is growing in authority but does not have the highest authority score might have an image snippet provided.
2. If all results had images, the search results would get over cluttered and the power of providing an image is actually a net negative, not a net positive.

To try to help the end user, I suggest that some images are provided and in other instances, the search results provides a way for people to click to get to a "preview" of the content. The image snippet would be a lower quality, less informative version of the preview. The images would attract employees to click the preview or go directly to the content, while the preview would allow people unsure if the content was what they were looking for a way to determine if the content is really what they were looking for.

And if you had not thought of it, the behavior of the image snippet and the viewing of the preview  can all feed into determining the best search results through authority and semantic methods.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Click through rates (#CTR) and search basics 101

Photo by Eric Ziegler

I recently completed reading and taking rough notes from David Amerland's Google Semantic Search. The books is well worth the exercise of reading. I recommend that you read through the book while expanding your thinking by trying to determine how it might apply beyond what David discusses. While I indicated that I am done reading the book, I still have 30+ rough notes to convert to intelligent blog posts. So sit back and relax over the next several weeks as I review and share my thoughts generated by David's book.

Today's thoughts are pretty simple and to the point. As I read David's book, I realize that I am relearning many concepts that I once knew while learning many new concepts. This post is about click through rates (#CTR) and the impacts that they have on search results. I am relearning CTR and also learned some new thoughts and concepts. What I knew was that CTRs include the number of people that clicks a link to go to a site. What I learned beyond what I knew was that CTR also how long the person stays on the page or site.

And the great thing about this is that semantic search finds value in analyzing the length of time someone visits a site or a piece of content. Semantic search infers that the quality of content is higher when a person reads the sites pages and content for longer periods of time. Basically, the longer people stay, the higher the likelihood the content is quality and the more trustworthy the content should be treated.

And the beauty of this is, that this basic principal applies to semantic search in the enterprise. And such a simple concept can have a very large impact on search results in the enterprise allowing people to find the content that is most valuable and most trust worthy.

Love it - search basics 101.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Trusting intranet sites to improve search results

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Authority of a site or page is crucial for determining how a page or a site will show up in search results. That is the case for the internet and that is the case for enterprise intranets.  So, how do you measure the authority of a page or site in an intranet? Can the interactions of employees on sites help determine the authority of a site? How much does trust play in the role of authority? If the employees trust the page, should that have an impact on the authority rank of the site? Can you measure how much employees trust a site?

My opinion? Yep.  

And in many cases there are ways to systematically determine the authority of the site because of the actions of the employees on the site. One way of determining if a site is trust worthy is to measure the frequency of employees viewing a site. As enterprises embrace social though, there is the huge potential on how improving intranet search results.

David Amerland's book, Google Semantic Search, talks specifically about the internet and the influence of social on search results. Specifically, he states that based on individual interactions (social included) the search results are influenced. The ideas discussed in David's book easily translate to an enterprise intranet that has an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). David's list of influencers include:

• Commenting in a blog post on the website
• Responding to comments on a blog post on the website
• Commenting about a website in social network
• Responding to comments about a website in social networks 
• Resharing the content of websites and adding a comment to the reshare
• Resharing the content of websites without adding any comment
• Following websites that have a presence on a social network
• “Liking” or “+ 1-ing” the content of websites
• Interacting with the social network posts of websites

Why is this list so important? Because the list provides a way for people to show that they trust the content. And if they show they trust the content, than the there is a higher chance that the page or site should have an increased authority.  And if the content has a higher authority rank, then it should show up higher on the search results.  Without this type of interaction, enterprise search will continue to fall short.  

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1560.

Multiple Authors, Authority and SEO

Photo by Sarah Ziegler

As I read through different books, each books gets me thinking and the note I create might not make perfect sense.  And sometimes when I review my notes, a note causes multiple thoughts to occur that are really not related.Today's and tomorrow's posts are both the outcome of the same note from the same location in David's book.

One of the issues with authorship occurs when more than one person is responsible for the blog post, document, wiki page. This is especially exposed when the last person that modified the document appears as the author of the document or content. Thankfully in the enterprise, there is a solution already in place to help resolve this issue (at least in most instances). Most internal collaboration and intranet systems include a mechanism identify each of the authors via history and versioning. Based on this history, the content can be attributed to each of the authors.

Enterprise search systems can use this extra meta data to increase authorship rank, trust and authority of that person on the subject while also influencing the page rank of other content from the same author on the same subject.

This comment was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1457

Page Rank, Authority and Enterprise Search

As explained in David's book, authority is used to help determine the rank of a piece of content.  And page rank is most likely influenced by using the items that David highlights in his book. Specifically:

• Who created the content
• What else that person has created in the past 
• The content creator’s social media connections
• The content creator’s online activity with further content
• The content creator’s interaction with other people
• How the content this person created was received in a social media setting
• The content’s quality, authority, and originality.
• The content’s stylistics (language level, reading difficulty, paragraph length, use of headings and subheadings, overall length, embedded links, supportive links in footnotes, citations, images, and any multimedia embedded in it.

I am not willing to completely read between the lines on this, but I sense that there could be a hint of not only knowing what content was created in the past by the person, but actually what content has the person created on the same subject in the past. If I do or do not read between the lines, I am thinking that authority can be taken to an extra layer of granularity within the enterprise.  What I mean is, authority can actually be assigned to employees for a specific subject area.  

Even in the enterprise, a page rank on a subject can still be applied using the bullets above with a couple of small adjustments.  Page rank would be influenced based on the person's previous content created on the subject, including both writing and social interactions on the subject.  

So, by building on the original thoughts in David's book, the ideas on determining the rank of a piece of content depends on not just the general authority of the person that created the content, but can be strengthened based on the authority the employee has on the subject the content is about.  (btw, I could have completely gone down the path that page rank should be based on the subject of the page, so it becomes more granular and is a subject page rank - this concept is much more difficult to do).

This comment was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon Location 1351

Enterprise Identity is not a Differentiator in Enterprise Search

Photo by Eric Ziegler

As I read David Amerland's book, and I learn more and more about how semantic search works, I start to get a better understanding of how semantic web and semantic search might work within the enterprise.  

In the David's book, he refers to identity as being very important for building trust, authority and reputation.  As I think about the enterprise, all content has an author associated with it, especially when the enterprise has a collaboration system like Jive or SharePoint. In addition all content on the intranet portal like the news and policies have an author.  So in the enterprise, identity is almost always associated with content.

As David explains, identity enables authority which enables trust and builds a persons reputation.  So the question that I asked myself is, if identity is critical for authority, trust and reputation.  And if all content in the enterprise has an identity associated with it, what is the differentiator that builds authority and trust?

The differentiator that I came up with is ... identity is not a differentiator but rather the differentiator happens downstream where reputation is built based on the person's ability to become an authority on a subject.

This comment was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon Location 1261