Ramanisblog

Tag: Web page

  • Google revels how it Ranks websites.

    For bloggers, I have always maintained that the content must be interesting,supported by facts/links and the posts are to be educative,informative and interesting.

    The blogger should be interested and believe in what he/she writes.

    One need not bother about as to how some body ranks, unless of course you write for money.

    Google on Monday revealed 10 recent changes to its search algorithm that affect results as diverse as those that are date-specific and those that are in Hindi.

    Google makes more than 500 changes to its search algorithm each year. Most are tiny and some — including a recent one that added real-time results for a third of search queries — affect a large proportion of searches.

    But Google rarely publicizes its algorithm changes. One reason: It does not want to give hints to the Web sites that try to game the algorithm so that their links show up higher in results. Google chose to reveal these changes because they are less susceptible to gaming, Matt Cutts, a distinguished engineer at Google who works on search quality, wrote in a company blog post.

    There is also another reason that Google is shedding some light on the black box of its algorithm. It is under fire from government regulators who are investigating it for antitrust violations. One of their main concerns is how little Google reveals about how search works, even though changes in the algorithm can drastically affect Web businesses.

    One of the new changes will affect searches in languages for which there is little Web content available, including Afrikaans, Hindi and Icelandic. Google will now translate relevant Web pages written in English and show those results, too.

    http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/google-reveals-tweaks-to-its-search-algorithm/

    Related:

    Ten recent algorithm changes

    11/14/11 | 8:30:00 AM

     

    Today we’re continuing our long-standing series of blog posts to share the methodology and process behind our search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes. This summer we published a video that gives a glimpse into our overall process, and today we want to give you a flavor of specific algorithm changes by publishing a highlight list of many of the improvements we’ve made over the past couple weeks.

    We’ve published hundreds of blog posts about search over the years on this blog, our Official Google Blog, and even on my personal blog. But we’re always looking for ways to give you even deeper insight into the over 500 changes we make to search in a given year. In that spirit, here’s a list of ten improvements from the past couple weeks:

    • Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
    • Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
    • Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
    • Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
    • Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
    • Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
    • Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
    • Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
    • Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
    • Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
    • http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

    Here’s how to play a Google a day.

    http://www.agoogleaday.com/#date=2011-11-17

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  • How to Groom your new Facebook Profile.

    Facebook recently introduced a new profile format to all 600 million or so of its members. The new layout is more photo-driven, and allows you to customize your profile more meticulously than before. But unless you go digging, you may miss some of its better features.

    The most obvious change is that your profile now includes a strip of five photographs across the top of the page. These are the five most recent photos in which you have been tagged. There are two things to which you should pay attention: First, the set of photos displayed to different friends of yours may vary, based on the privacy settings of the individual pictures. Second, you may not actually be in some of these photos.

    To see how your profile will appear to a specific friend, go to your Account menu and click on Privacy Settings. Under the Connecting on Facebook section at the top, click View Settings. This will jump to a page full of controls. At the upper right, look for a big button labeled Preview My Profile.

    When you click Preview My Profile, Facebook will show you what your profile looks like to you. But at the top of the preview page, there’s a box into which you can type any friend’s name. When you do, the profile preview will change to show you how your profile will be displayed to that friend. Most notably, it may have a different set of photos at the top.

    You may find yourself tagged in a photo in which you don’t appear –- some users do this to call your attention to a picture -– or in a photo of someone else, with you hiding in the background. If such photos are atop your profile, it can be confusing for others. To banish these pictures from your profile page, you’ll need to go to each photo’s page and click Remove Tag next to your name beneath the picture. You may want to send a note to whoever took the picture, explaining why you untagged yourself.

    The other hidden feature in the new profiles is called Featured People. If you edit your profile, you’ll see this option at the upper left, directly beneath the one for your profile picture. By default, Featured People displays two groups of profile pictures down the left side of your profile page: Friends (that’s everyone you’re linked with), and Family, if you’ve identified anyone as such. In the Featured People configuration panel, there are two ways to customize the display: You can add a Facebook Group if you belong to any, or you can create one or more ad-hoc lists of friends to display under the headings of your choice, for example “Roommates.”

    Now that so many people have more Facebook connections than they can keep track of, often including complete strangers, this is a good way to let everyone know who your extra special friends are.

    http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/how-to-groom-your-new-facebook-profile/?src=me&ref=technology

  • Model describes Web page popularity.

    Image representing Wikipedia as depicted in Cr...
    Image via CrunchBase

     

    Story:

    “We see that Internet behaves in unpredictable ways, with big shifts in attention causing changes which have statistical signatures like those seen in earthquakes and avalanches,” Jacob Ratkiewicz from Indiana University told PhysOrg.com.

    Ratkiewicz and his coauthors from Indiana University and the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy, have published their study on online popularity in a recent issue of . As they explain, online information that becomes popular has formidable power to impact opinions, culture, and policy, as well as earn higher advertising profits. Achieving online popularity is obviously highly desired for these reasons, but as previous studies have found, very few sites become tremendously popular.

    In the researchers’ analysis, the popularity of a article or Web page is expressed by the number of clicks to that page and the number of external links to that page. While previous studies have found that the popularity distribution of follows power-law behavior, it has been difficult to observe the growth in popularity of individual pages due to the lack of data with temporal information. Here, the researchers gathered the traffic data of millions of pages (3 million Wikipedia articles with a one-second time resolution during 2001-2007; 3 million Wikipedia articles with a one-hour time resolution during 2008-2010; and 3 million Web pages from Chile’s .cl domain with a one-year time resolution during 2002-2006). They obtained the Wikipedia data by mining the full edit history of every article and the Chilean Web page data using the country’s TODOCL search engine.

    Among their results, the researchers found that almost all pages experience a burst of popularity near the beginning of their lives. Then, some pages maintain a constant exponential growth, while many other pages experience intermittent bursts. Looking at these bursts more closely, the researchers found that their distribution follows a “heavy-tail” behavior, which is a common feature of critical systems. In a heavy-tail distribution, most of the items exhibit small values, but a few items exhibit very large values that dominate the overall volume of traffic. As the researchers noted, these bursts are different from those observed in news-driven events, where attention fades rapidly; instead, sequences of bursts occur for certain Web pages and these pages accumulate popularity.

    http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-web-page-popularity.html

     

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