Getting Information about Search, SEO, and the Semantic Web Directly from the Search Engines
Opinion News in Top Stories Earlier this year, I wrote a post about news stories that are shown in carousels in Google Top Stories Are Chosen By Importance Scores The patent I wrote about in that post told us that Google may attempt to show opinion pieces related to topics that were being identified as ... Read more The post Opinion News Found By...
Dec 2020
How Are Featured Snippet Answers Decided Upon?I recently wrote about Featured Snippet Answer Scores Ranking Signals. In that post, I described how Google was likely using query dependent and query independent ranking signals to create answer scores for queries that were looking like they wanted answers.One of the inventors of that patent from that...
Oct 2020
Featured Snippet Answers Based on ContextLast month I wrote about answer passages when Google decides what answers to show in response to queries that are asking questions, in the post, Featured Snippet Answer Scores Ranking Signals. In that post, I wrote about an updated patent which made it clear that passages that might be shown in response to a...
Oct 2020
Calculating Featured Snippet Answer ScoresAn update this week to a patent tells us how Google may score featured snippet answers.When a search engine ranks search results in response to a query, it may use a combination of query dependant and query independent ranking signals to determine those rankings.A query dependant signal may depend on a term...
Sep 2020
I’ve written a couple of posts about patents at Google on personalized knowledge graphs (a topic worth thinking about seriously).When Google introduced the “Knowledge Graph” in 2012, they told us about just one knowledge graph. But it appears that they didn’t intend the idea of a knowledge graph to be a singular one – there are more than one knowledge...
Sep 2020
Entity Seeking Queries and Semantic Dependency TreesQueries for some searches may be entity seeking queries.Someone may ask something like, “What is the hotel that looks like a sail.” That query may be looking for an entity that is the building, the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah.Those entities may be identified in Semantic Dependency Trees, that answer the...
Jul 2020
Changes to How Google Might Rank Image Search ResultsWe are seeing more references to machine learning in how Google is ranking pages and other documents in search results.That seems to be a direction that will leave what we know as traditional, or old school signals that are referred to as ranking signals behind.It’s still worth considering some of...
Jul 2020
A Well-Formed Query Helps a Search Engine understand User Intent Behind the QueryTo start this post, I wanted to include a couple of whitepapers that include authors from Google. The authors of the first paper are the inventors of a patent application that was just published on April 28, 2020, and it is very good seeing a white paper from the inventors...
Jun 2020
I worked for the Courts of Delaware at Superior Court.I started working there as the Assistant Criminal Deputy Prothonotary.I changed positions after 7 years there, and I became a Mini/Micro Computer Network Administrator.The Court used an old English title for that first position which meant that I supervised Court Clerks in the Criminal Department...
May 2020
I came across an interesting Search Engine Land post last week. It inspired me to search and see if I could find a patent that might be related to it from Google:Google is suggesting searches based on users’ recent activityI tried to reproduce the search suggestions that were being shown to the author of the Search Engine Land article, but Google would...
May 2020
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