Aug26

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Wired for Information: A Brain Built to Google

In my last Search Insider, I took you on a neurological tour that gave us a glimpse into how our brains are built to read. Today, let’s dig deeper into how our brains guide us through an online hunt for information.
Brain Scans and Searching
First, a recap. In Nicholas Carr’s Book, The Shallows, What the Internet is doing to Our Brains, I focused on one passage – and one concept – in particular. It’s likely that our brains have built a short cut for reading. The normal translation from a printed word to a concept usually requires multiple mental steps. But [...]

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Aug19

Gord Hotchkiss

0

How Our Brains are Wired to Read

How do we read? How do we take the arbitrary, human-made code that is the written word and translate into thoughts and images that mean something to our brain, an organ that had it’s basic wiring designed thousands of generations before the appearance of the first written word? What is going on in your skull right now as your eyes scan the black squiggly lines that make up this column?
The Reading Short Cut
I’m currently reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”, a follow up to Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us [...]

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Aug12

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Thoughts from a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Funny, how our brains make us hang on to things that make little sense in the new scheme of things. But, for as plastic as the brain is, there are worn grooves that cannot be denied. We are creatures of habit and those habits comfort us – make us feel in control of our environment. Even when there is no ration for our recurring behaviors, habits keep things plowing along, giving us a sense of equilibrium.
Every time I cross the Atlantic, where history is the natural state of things, I gain a new appreciation for this clash of the new [...]

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Aug09

Gord Hotchkiss

0

White Salmon and Black Swans

The conversation started innocently enough – we were entertaining out of town guests at a winery and restaurant overlooking Lake Okanagan. And, as often happens when people visit B.C., they ordered salmon.
“You know, I heard that not all salmon are pink. There are actually white salmon.”
“Really, I’ve never heard of that.”
“Well, let’s see if there really are white salmon.”
So, we turned to the arbitrator of all such things – Google. If it can be found on the web, apparently it exists. Which is an interesting behavior in itself, and a point I’ll come back to in a minute. But first, [...]

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Aug09

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Search May Not be Sexy Anymore, But It Pays the Bills

Is it just me, or is search getting boring? It’s been months since we’ve had a good, ruckus raising tidbit to get our teeth into. The Bing-Yahoo integration? That’s the best you can do? Yawn.
Is it me…
I suspect that it is, in part anyway, me. To be honest, I haven’t been much of a “Search Insider” lately. In the past few months, precious little of my time has been spent pondering the industry. I’m way behind on industry news and haven’t attended a search conference or event for a few months. My days have been full with the busy-ness of [...]

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Aug04

Gord Hotchkiss

0

The Jill Hotchkiss Inflection Point

Technology has reached a critical point in the adoption curve. My wife, who is imminently practical and intolerant of anything that smacks of gadgetry, is becoming intrigued by my iPhone. I can’t overstate the importance of this in terms of watershed moments. Steve Jobs, if you can get my wife to buy into your vision, you have crossed the chasm.
There’s something important to note here in attitudes towards technology that we digerati, gathered together on the leading edge of the bell curve, often forget. Technology only becomes important to most people when it lets them do something they care [...]

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Aug03

Charlotte Bourne

0

Ranking in Google News

If you are a publisher looking to get your content surfaced in the search results page, you may want to consider using Google News. Unlike web results, which use the number of incoming links (among other factors) to judge the value of a website, news articles are more recent and haven’t had the same amount of time to generate incoming links. Therefore, optimizing for Google News is a bit different that traditional web SEO. There’s a three stage process in ranking in Google News.
First, Google must crawl your news articles. There are two ways Googlebot can find your article: either [...]

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Jul30

Ian Everdell

1

The UX of a University Website, xkcd Style

Ever had to visit a university campus and tried to use the campus map on their website to figure out where you need to go? It’s not easy. Between my wife’s recent acceptance to medical school (and the ensuing flurry of activity to get her registered, find a place to live, move across the country, and so on…) and a number of university experiences myself, I’m fairly confident in saying that, in general, universities have less-than-stellar website usability.
“But Ian,” you say, “as the upper echelons of higher education, shouldn’t these institutions be well-equipped to serve the needs of their [...]

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Jul29

John Yuill

3

Viewing AdWords Search Query Terms: Let Us Count the Ways!

Using Google AdWords reports to track performance of the keywords you are bidding on is one of the fundamentals of search marketing success, and the ease with which this can be done is a source of delight for search marketers, especially when compared to measuring traditional forms of advertising. But most folks also realize the additional value of being able to look behind the scenes to see the actual search queries that users are typing in and using that information to refine campaigns accordingly. Not so very long ago in the short history of search engine marketing, this [...]

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Jul20

Jody Nimetz

3

What Happens When Link Popularity, well Becomes Less Popular?

The success of the Web has traditionally been based around linking, so much so that the search engine algorithms are based heavily on thinks like link popularity amongst hundreds of other elements.  The fact is that the engines do place a lot of weight on link popularity and link authority.  My concern is that pages with high link popularity do not always serve up the best result for my needs as a searcher.  This is one reason why I was excited to see some of the focus from Google switch to real-time search results.  Many real-time search results do not [...]

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