Just for general interest, until recently (agreed, I may have been
wearing some kind of blindfold and not noticed!) I believed from
tracking back searches that stemming was on simple pluralising,
verbalising, etc. So swims, swimmers, swimming etc reduce to "swim"
as a highlighted word if "swim" is the search term. I didn't think
complex variations of the stem were recognised.
However, just seen the search term "cattery" being recognised (by
highlighting) as a diminutive of the complex plural "catteries". Tbh,
I don't keep much of an eye on this site for trackback purposes, so
this could have been the case for a while - but interesting I hope,
nonetheless ;-) And what a huge development in linguistic
understanding by the googlebot.
Not exactly new... but I must admit... I'm not sure how long it's been
going on.
(I love the fact they show up in bold... makes my job that little bit
easier ;))
> Not exactly new... but I must admit... I'm not sure how long it's been
> going on.
> (I love the fact they show up in bold... makes my job that little bit
> easier ;))
Search for: [ tesol accredit ] or [ tesol accrediting ] and you will
see [ accreditation ] highlighted.
Also, note that [ accredit ] does not appear on my site but
[ accredited ] and [ accreditation ] are used frequently.
Now if I google for:-
site:www.tesol-direct.com +accredit
it says Did you mean: site:www.tesol-direct.com +"accredited"
It seems that having FIRST detected that my site does NOT contain
[ accredit ] but has a closely rleated [ accredited ] it offers that
instead. It is not simply offering it because it is closely related;
it is offering it because the original term does could not be found
(on that site).
If I repeat the same operation on a huge site, exact matches are found
and no such near-alternatives (Did you mean ...) are offered.
eg site:www.bbc.co.uk +accredit
It goes a bit further than simple stemming. A UK search for "Smart Car
NOS" will show you a snippet with "Nitrous" highlighted in bold. The
word "NOS" is not used anywhere on the site or in anchor text that
links to the site. Google seems to be quite capable of ranking on
synonyms now. (NOS is a brand name for Nitrous systems).
Why would anyone be surpised at this? It makes perfect sense to me, in
the future maybe exact keywords and phrases in content will bet less
important than the context of other words.
I guess Google is discerning quality content by what variations of the
search term are present on a page... Maybe they will extract the
quality of content based on the unique meaning of the words when
compared against the search term?
Honestly... I'm not sure if Google uses links anymore to determine
relevancy... I think they just build a huge world wide word density
cloud and use that to abstract the depth of information for a search
term based on the frequency it appears within a community...
I mean... If I can within reason think that something like that was
actually possible... what's stopping a muti billion dollar empire with
virtually unlimited resources from doing it... or at the very least
trying it... or more likely... doing something one hundred times more
accurate that anything I could dream of...
> It goes a bit further than simple stemming. A UK search for "Smart Car
> NOS" will show you a snippet with "Nitrous" highlighted in bold. The
> word "NOS" is not used anywhere on the site or in anchor text that
> links to the site.
Wrong. Check out the cached copy:
These search terms have been highlighted: smart car
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: nos
That's nothing new - I have several pages that do this.
And it's been occupying my mind a little for some time.
A link is traditionally regarded as a "vote" for the site, and is held
to increase its popularity. Anchor text in such a link is a "vote"
for each of the keywords - is Google trying to improve the quality of
search results by actively responding to keywords that the author of a
particular page may simply have omitted?
It seems to me that anchor text keywords are only marginally less
important than <title> keywords, and as important if not more
important than any other keywords.
Are you saying that we're doing a good job? :-) I'll pass it on to the
teams involved, it's nice to see that their work is not going
unnoticed!
One other element that plays a role in all of this is personalized
search. That can help with stemming, but it can also be really
interesting when it comes to disambiguation in general. "NOS" can be a
synonym for a kind of car enhancement technology, but it can also mean
a lot of other things: http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Anos .
Words like "mercury" can be even more complicated:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amercury . If the search engine
knows that you're an astronomy-fan, maybe it will be able to help you
find the planet first.
You'll have to read the minds of webmasters and give them their site
regardless of how well or poorly they optimized it for the most
generic of search terms ;)
Oh, wait, I think you do this too, but they have to concentrate really
hard on that LOL
