Presentation by Senior Scientist at Google

[garyp]

These presentation slides (3.5 MB; PDF) might be of interest to some of you.

They come from a keynote presentation by Amit Singhal (http://singhal.info), a Senior Research Scientist at Google.

It's titled: Challenges in Running a Commercial Search Engine
http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/Workshops/searchandcollaboration2004/papers/haifa.pdf

The presentation was given in Israel on February 16th at IBM’s Second Search and Collaboration Seminar 2004. (http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/Workshops/searchandcollaboration2004/index.html)

Comments?

[orion]

Gary, thanks again for such refreshing finding. Singhal is a well respected IR scientist.

It captured my attention one graphic showing that for Google and most search engines is easy to spot keyword spamming by looking at keyword density values and term repetitions. This is done to pin point and purge results. Some SEOs/SEMs mistake this filtering action as a keyword weight mechanism.

I know this paper is from Feb, so their solutions against keyword spamming may or may not have been changed. After reading the pdf presentation, it occurred to me doing a search for "terrible candidate" (without quotes). One can see #2 out of 340,000 results in Google this site www.robbernard.com/archives/001099.html repeating so often the first term ("terrible") and not the other and getting away with the spamming of the first term.

This makes me think whether or not Google is now checking for key phrase spamming more than for single keyword spamming. Of course I could be wrong and a single case does not amount to a pattern. I think this is worth to investigate.

The paper is a good source of information for SEOs/SEMs. Great finding, Gary.

Just for the record: this was a random example. I do not necessarily agree with the content of the chosen example, nor implies and endorsement or detraction for any political party or candidate. Maybe it wasn't the best example. My apologies in advance, just in case.

Orion