Apparently Google has secretly been working on “the next generation of Google Search … an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine.” And you can be among the first to try it out, here:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

It’s clearly faster. Are the results better? It seems they are different at least. My first impression is that they’re a little more commercially oriented — more Bing-like so to speak.

You can check out a discussion at webmaster world.

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Image (detail) from Gibsonclaire’s photostream

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Try Google’s new search engine

You can also get plugins for various browsers from Yoast.

Personalized search means that your search engine results will be skewed according to your browsing history.

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Weekend update: personalized search

One of the applications of this line of research is for machine translation. How does the translation engine determine, for example, whether the word lead in a text refers to the heavy metal or to the concept of leadership?

One way to try to answer that question is to look for patterns in the denotative and connotative qualities of  the lexicon of the passage. Looking for themes that interlace the selection of words might help to determine the sense in which they are being used and also help to highlight the passage’s main concerns.

Consider, for example, the opening of Flaubert’s Salammbo. (I picked this text up from a website that did not identify the translator but simply gave the credit “etext prepared by John Bickers”)

It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. The soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were having a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and as the master was away, and they were numerous, they ate and drank with perfect freedom.

The captains, who wore bronze cothurni, had placed themselves in the central path, beneath a gold-fringed purple awning, which reached from the wall of the stables to the first terrace of the palace; the common soldiers were scattered beneath the trees, where numerous flat-roofed buildings might be seen, wine-presses, cellars, storehouses, bakeries, and arsenals, with a court for elephants, dens for wild beasts, and a prison for slaves.

Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a wood of sycamores stretched away to meet masses of verdure, where the pomegranate shone amid the white tufts of the cotton-plant; vines, grape-laden, grew up into the branches of the pines; a field of roses bloomed beneath the plane- trees; here and there lilies rocked upon the turf; the paths were strewn with black sand mingled with powdered coral, and in the centre the avenue of cypress formed, as it were, a double colonnade of green obelisks from one extremity to the other.

Far in the background stood the palace, built of yellow mottled Numidian marble, broad courses supporting its four terraced stories. With its large, straight, ebony staircase, bearing the prow of a vanquished galley at the corners of every step, its red doors quartered with black crosses, its brass gratings protecting it from scorpions below, and its trellises of gilded rods closing the apertures above, it seemed to the soldiers in its haughty opulence as solemn and impenetrable as the face of Hamilcar.

Looking at this passage we can easily pick out certain themes and observe how the author’s vocabulary reinforces them. (This is just a quick demonstration and not an attempt at a fully worked-out critical analysis.) Clearly Flaubert meant to impress us with the magnitude, exoticism, and lushness of his setting and with the concepts of military authority and its obverse of excess and lack of restraint. He works hard to create an intensified vividness of setting. Notice how his words align to emphasize certain concepts.

I limited myself to six columns for fit in my text window. Of course there are many words relating to feasting and celebration. There is also an element of danger and impending violence associated with the martial aspect and references to scorpions and the like that I could have picked out, as well as a sort of architectural exoticism, but these six topical groupings fairly well underscore the main themes of the passage. In fact, they predict pretty well the overall themes of the entire book.

Now fast forward to the present. I this that search engines use a similar analysis to determine the topicality of web pages. Some such analysis could be done on the page itself. Web search specialists use the term keywords to describe the words they hope to rank for in search engine results pages. But notice that this sort of analysis can help to determine not just the keywords but the context in which they are being used. A similar analysis could be done to the anchor texts and surrounding words in links leading to the web page.

Poets and other literary types have always been sensitive to these sorts of word associations. Even in nonliterary prose, the careful web author would be wise to do likewise.

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Topicality in literary writing, and its implications for web search optimization

I’m sure the number of links is not staggering compared to pages that go viral on places like Digg. Still, the glossary has gotten about 5,000 views over the past five days.

Laura Resnick was thoughful enough to send me an e-mail explaining, “In case no one has already told you, a link to your delightful Publishing Glossary has lately been passed around various private e-lists of professional writers, and we’re enjoying the glossary very much! Thanks for a good laugh.”

Thanks to the writers for sharing the link to my site rather than just ripping off the content. I guess writers are a good group to engage if you’re looking for links, since these days they all have blogs and they are motivated to, well, write. (I’d also guess from this list that writers will always need proofreaders.) The ones who linked back to me seemed a genial and generous lot.

This page first went up back in 2006. It’s gotten a bunch of links over the years, but never such a big flood all at once as this. I’ve made no effort at link-building, so this is what a “natural” wave of links looks like. How would Google distinguish this natural wave of links from the kinds of “artificial” link-building campaigns that they say they discount in their search result rankings?

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Writers reading Right Reading

Today’s guest post at ForeWord Magazine is about how book publishers can increase traffic to their websites.

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Driving traffic

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Google gone wild

A few months ago, scholars from the University of Graz in Austria released a 187-page pdf document, entitled Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google. (The file is large, so I recommend downloading and opening it from your hard disk rather than trying to access it through a browser.) The authors’ goal is to examine the implications of “the monopolistic behaviour of Google.” They assert that “Google’s open aim is to know everything there is to know on Earth. It cannot be tolerated that a private company has that much power: it can extort, control, and dominate the world at will.”

While the writing is a bit clunky, the report is interesting not only for its content but as an expression of a concern that seems stronger in Europe than in the U.S. Following is the report’s overview of its contents:

1. To concentrate on Google as virtual monopoly, and Google’s reported support of Wikipedia. To find experimental evidence of this support or show that the reports are not more than rumours.
2. To address the copy-past syndrome with socio-cultural consequences associated with it.
3. To deal with plagiarism and IPR violations as two intertwined topics: how they affect various players (teachers and pupils in school; academia; corporations; governmental studies, etc.). To establish that not enough is done concerning these issues, partially due to just plain ignorance. We will propose some ways to alleviate the problem.
4. To discuss the usual tools to fight plagiarism and their shortcomings.
5. To propose ways to overcome most of above problems according to proposals by Maurer/Zaka. To examples [sic], but to make it clear that do this more seriously [sic] a pilot project is necessary beyond this particular study.
6. To briefly analyze various views of plagiarism as it is quite different in different fields (journalism, engineering, architecture, painting, …) and to present a concept that avoids plagiarism from the very beginning.
7. To point out the many other dangers of Google or Google-like undertakings: opportunistic ranking, analysis of data as window into commercial future.
8. To outline the need of new international laws.
9. To mention the feeble European attempts to fight Google, despite Google’s growing power.
10. To argue that there is no way to catch up with Google in a frontal attack.
11. To argue that fighting large search engines and plagiarism slice-by-slice by using dedicated servers combined by one hub could eventually decrease the importance of other global search engines.
12. To argue that global search engines are an area that cannot be left to the free market, but require some government control or at least non-profit institutions. We will mention other areas where similar if not as glaring phenomena are visible.
13. We will mention in passing the potential role of virtual worlds, such as the currently overhyped system “second life”.
14. To elaborate and try out a model for knowledge workers that does not require special search engines, with a description of a simple demonstrator.
15. To propose concrete actions and to describe an Austrian effort that could, with moderate support, minimize the role of Google for Austria.

Among the authors’ claims are that Google is “massively invading privacy,” that its SERPS (search results) are corrupted by its ad system (favoring advertizers) and that this is a necessary result of its for-profit structure, that the internet itself is becoming skewed to a slanted “Google-Wikipedia version of reality,” that by acquiring extensive privileged information Google is positioned to play stock markets with what amounts to insider information and massively affect world economic structures, that commercial considerations cause Google to condone plagiarism, and more.

While particular charges may be debated, the idea of so much of the world’s information being held by a single company should give anyone pause. Should search be government-controlled or regulated on a nonprofit basis as the authors’ suggest? Wouldn’t such information in the hands of government be at least as troubling as the present arrangement? Or is Google such a power now that it is already in effect a kind of virtual world government of sorts, operating at the bequest of its shareholders? Can massive knowledge be regulated without compounding its potential exploitation?

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Image: Vision of Google in 2084, New York Times, 10 October 2005, reprinted in the report cited above.

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Google dangers and opportunities

Dutch and Flemish type is certainly one of the most distinguished traditions in the West, and one that has been the most consistently productive over the centuries. What some people think of as distinctly British type — Caslon, notably — is really type work in the Dutch tradition. Moreover, some the liveliest current typefaces are being produced from this region. Check out this beautiful half title page:

Google Book Search puts the entire book online. Tables of Contents such as this one are functional just as in print books as one can skip to a particular page. The quality of the scans, however, is a little disappointing (but you can zoom in and out, and you can also choose to view either single pages or spreads).

Here is a detail from a sample text page with an image:

This illustrates how Google’s search feature returns results:

Google Book Search’s overview page provides links to reviews and references:

There’s a keyword feature. I guess it could be useful.

And a related books feature, which is sure to expand as more titles enter the program:

A Google Maps mashup provides a mapping function that could be useful in some instances:

So are you really going to want to read this entire book of 320 pages online? (In contrast to Project Gutenberg, GBS does not provide texts in a conveniently downloadable format.) Probably not. I would think of this instead as analogous to a bookstore that provides chairs for people to sit and browse. Instead of providing only a small portion of content, the entire book is available for your perusal. I suspect that on balance this will lead to more book sales. GBS provides links for buying the book or for finding it in a library:

One annoying feature of Book Search is that, although there is a “full screen” option in the read pages view, there seems to be no way to remove the search bar at the top of the overview pages (as you can with Google Image Search, for example). Moreover,whatever term is in that box will be highlighted wherever it occurs in the book pages. The best workaround that I’ve found is to search for a term that rarely occurs so that there are a minimum of highlights. I wish this header could go away, however, as it is using up valuable real estate on the screen.

Dutch Type is expensive at 62.50 euros (about US$86) direct from the publisher (shipping to U.S. must be expensive since the book weighs 3.5 pounds) and $99 from Amazon; I haven’t checked other vendors’ prices. Below is a link in case you’d like to buy the book from Amazon. For alternative sources go to the book search page, as explained above, or visit your favorite independent bookstore.

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Dutch Type

There’s a nice selection of (mostly) postwar Polish posters at a Grayspace Poster Gallery.

I’ve set the background to white in the selections above, using the “remove background image” and “page color to white” bookmarklets (I realized afterwards that I should also have set the text to black, and I found the zap colors bookmarklet that both sets the background to white and the text to black). I like clarity. Not everyone does. Without the bookmarklets applied the site looks like this:

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Polish Posters

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New insights into the Google search algorithm

If you do an image search on Google and then append &imgtype=face to the end of the url, what do you get? You get only faces as results. The above images are all from this site. Interestingly, the tags under the images are not the filenames or the alt or title tags but text that is near the image on the source page. I’m guessing these images were tagged as “face” via Google’s enhanced image search and labeler. But it seems a step, if a rudimentary one, toward more visual image searching.

The image is clickable if you want a closer look.

Via Marketing Pilgrim.

Update: Hey, here’s a related post from Slashdot. Computers outperform humans at recognizing faces.

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&imgtype=face

WorldCat provides standard bibliographic information. It will show a list of libraries within a range of a specified zip codes. It will allow e-mail follow-ups to searches. Users can post reviews of titles. Unfortunately its only prominent link for purchasing titles is Amazon, although other options may appear in search results.

Here is what a search for Julio Cortazar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds turns up.

When I mentioned it to a librarian friend, he wrote the following:

Yes, it is a very useful tool produced by OCLC, which, however, is taking over the (library) world like Starbuck’s or McDonald’s. Though it is extremely helpful, and wonderful in concept, it is also insidious, and I am very wary of it. It is controlling and unifying all library cataloging and in some places outside of the US and replacing wonderfully enlightening and useful cataloging with bland, uniform, insufficient and extremely conformist cataloging. OCLC is forcing old school and creative catalogers and librarians out of jobs as it grows ever larger. Use it at your own risk & only if necessary. KILL it if you can.

So I guess this is another of those modern dilemmas that seem to be springing up more and more frequently. Good resource, soulless librarian killer, or both?

Opinions?

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WorldCat Library Search

Over at Google Blogoscoped they’ve been talking about Google results for the query “how to get a …” Seems the things people appear to want are a passport, a six pack, a girl (or guy), and a book published.

Well, I can’t help much with the six pack, the girl, or the passport. But “how to get a book published” yields 54,100,000 results. And guess who’s number 1?

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How to Get a Book Published

Are you in shape for following step 12 in the instructions shown in the screen capture?

Via Google Blogoscoped. While at GB, check out Raymond Chandler’s 1953 mention of Google.

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Swim, Swim, Swim!

Click image for more info.

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200+ U-Turns

According to Google, “when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.” So the theory is that by denying linkjuice Wikipedia will stem article spam.

NoFollow has always been controversial, and the response to Wikipedia’s decision has been mixed. Rand Fishkin at SeoMoz (which has also instituted NoFollow) says Wikipedia has finally made the right decision. But he offers surprisingly little to defend that position.

Peter Da Vanzo at blog.v7n.com says the decision has scant significance:

Here’s a question: why do people assume that if Wikipedia adds nofollow, then the links won’t count in search engine calculations? It wouldn’t take much for the search engines to make Wikipedia a special case, and ignore the nofollow tag, if that isn’t the case already.

And another: How do people know that Wikipedia was passing any (real) PageRank or authority before? There are many pages which aren’t using the nofollow tag that also aren’t passing any measurable PageRank and/or authority, probably due to some hand tweaking.

Barry Welford thinks search engines are running up against Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

In a sense, Wikipedia is correcting the fallacy in the whole Google PageRank approach. It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. There are some things you can’t measure. If you try to measure them then they’re not the same. Once Google says inlinks will boost a web page’s relevancy, then of course everyone, often supercharged with dumb computer programs, generates as many inlinks as they can.

My opinion? I don’t like NoFollow. I think it amounts to trying to get a free ride by benefiting from links without paying the cost for them. In fact, I’ve added a plug-in that removes the default NoFollow from my blog comments. If anyone wants to comment, I can approve or deny the comment, so the onus is on me to decide whether the link should stand. If commenters have added something of value then I think they deserve any link benefit I can give back to them (my home page, btw, is currently PR6).

I also feel that NoFollow will have little if any effect on the value of Wikipedia contributions. Even with NoFollow, links still bring traffic, and since Wikipedia is likely to continue to rank high in the SERPs, scam sites will still benefit from Wikipedia links if they can get them. In fact, a lot of the spam links submitted to this blog already have the NoFollow tag embedded. By instituting NoFollow, Wikipedia probably hurts honest sites more than scammers — just the sites that took Wikipedia to the top of the SERPs by linking to them in the first place.

So put me in the camp of the sensible Philipp Lenssen who writes at Google Blogoscoped:

What happens as a consequence, in my opinion, is that Wikipedia gets valuable backlinks from all over the web, in huge quantity, and of huge importance — normal links, not “nofollow” links; this is what makes Wikipedia rank so well — but as of now, they’re not giving any of this back. The problem of Wikipedia link spam is real, but the solution to this spam problem may introduce an even bigger problem: Wikipedia has become a website that takes from the communities but doesn’t give back, skewing web etiquette as well as tools that work on this etiquette (like search engines, which analyze the web’s link structure). That’s why I find Wikipedia’s move very disappointing.

Perhaps the most interesting response to the news came from Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim. He is adding NoFollow to links to Wikipedia from his site.

UPDATE, 24 JAN. Andy Beard has made a Wikipedia NoFollow plug-in, and Aaron Pratt offers a good commentary.

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NoFollow revisited

1. Google’s selection skews “the world’s knowledge” toward English-language texts, especially those from the U.S. (For example, searches for Dante, Cervantes and Goethe find not the original texts but English translations.)
2. Google snippets decontextualize texts, and the works presented so far are poor in visual quality.
3. Google Books SERPS inappropriately rank results, perhaps with a bias toward results with commercial ramifications.
4. There are dangers with the privitization of collective knowledge. Google has already shown a complicity with censorship in China.
5. Google’s liberal interpretation of copyright laws may not fully respect the legal or moral rights of authors.

Bearman concludes his abstract by expressing his opinion that “Jean-Noël Jeanneney has done us all a service by reminding us to look under the hood and hold Google, and those providing content to it, accountable. In the two years since Google first announced its ambitions, I think the D-Lib community has largely given Google the benefit of the doubt; now that some results are visible and the implications are more clear, I think it’s time to publicly endorse open access to rights-cleared, high quality, scanned page images and reconsider the appropriate roles for academic and public institutions participating in commercial analogue heritage conversion efforts that don’t contribute to this end.”

this item first noted at if:book

In related news: a few months ago Google announced a new program, Google Purge, as part of “a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.”

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Universal Google?

• Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim
• Cartoon Barry Blog
• Daggle: Danny sullivan’s Blog
• Dan Zarrella
• David Naylor
• Gray Hat Search Engine News
• Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
• Micro Persuasion
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Watch
• SEO Book.com
• SEO Buzz Box
• SEO by the SEA
• SEO Egghead by Jamie Sirovich
• SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
• Shoemoney – Skills to Pay the Bills
• Small Business SEM
• Stuntdubl Business Search Marketing Consulting
• Sugarrae AKA Rae Hoffman
• Threadwatch.org – Marketing and Technology Discussed

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Speaking of SEO

First there was the unfortunate Kimberly Williams — a case more of scraping than SEO per se, but the response came from the SEOs when she tried to prevent her content from being scraped. Next came Ted Leonsis, whose mild comments about being his own SEO made him the object of an SEO contest with a $500 cash prize. Now Jason Calacanis is the latest to have offended the SEOs.

I find search engine optimization interesting. I subscribe to a number of SEO feeds, and several of the people in the industry are clever and creative. But some are starting to seem like bullies.

I think I might be rooting for Ted Leonsis to win the Ted Leonsis SEO contest.

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Link: Wikipedia on protection rackets

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Is SEO the new protection racket?

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Google Calls Google Alerts Spam