Gasta News: Launch your own search engine for your community, your needs

Web searches for minority groups


The genesis of the World Wide Web, in a Swiss laboratory, to serve a multi-national team of physicists, might lead many to think that the network is blind when it comes to race, sex, creed and colour.
But some sites are taking steps to address shortcomings in the way that the web serves some sectors of the population.
In October, Ask gave its search engine a fresh interface to help with its new-found focus on its core search audience, 60% of which were women.
In the US, a search site aimed squarely at black Americans, launched in April 2008.
Rushmore Drive's creator, Johnny Taylor, said search results can be more relevant to some social groups than to others. He cited the example of Type 2 diabetes, which predominantly affects Afro-Caribbean and Asian people.
He said: "If a user were to search for diabetes on Google, why would [Google] rank diabetes results as it pertains to black Americans early on in the result set, when only 14% of the US population is black?"
Results ranking
All search engines generate their results by looking at links leading to a webpage to get a sense of how important it is to web debate on that subject.
In such a set 'relevance' is a quantitative rather than a qualitative measure, and it is a short step from the 'wisdom of the crowds' to the 'tyranny of the majority'.
Said Mr Taylor: "People can affect change on Google, but the black population has less of an influence on Google to affect the result rankings."
With Rushmore Drive, said Mr Taylor, "it is more a matter of optimising the relevancy ranking based on one's cultural identity."
Rushmore Drive's editorial team seeks out sites relevant to the black community, and uses a unique algorithm which weights "black results" higher. It also exploits user feedback to tweak the relevance of results.
Aleks Krotoski, a social psychologist researcher at the University of Surrey, argued that such initiatives need to be seen in a wider sociological context.
"Each community has its own social norms, its own mores which are part of how its members make sense of the world," she said.
"Technology isn't a passive tool. It reflects the social norms and the mores of the people who developed it.
"So, the results of any search come from the algorithms and databases of their cultural perspectives," she added.
"They may not speak to or reflect the identity or needs of the minority group, who would achieve much better results by developing their own system from the bottom-up rather than to use one imposed from the top-down," she continued.
Web ownership
For Bill Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), there is no doubt that the web is a divisive force.
"There's still a relationship between using the internet and socio-economic status," he said.
"Those that have higher socio-economic status tend to be more likely to be online; that's to do with having a PC in the home," said Mr Dutton. "That's a barrier."
Research in the early 90s by the OII suggested that those living in "distressed" inner-city areas tended to feel that in using the web they were using someone else's technology.
"With web use becoming more common among younger people, there is a greater sense of ownership," he said.
Also, he added, there was no doubt that the web was getting more representative as it started to include more languages.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have already picked up on the trend towards more niche web use by providing the means to develop individual search engines via Custom Search and Search Builder sites.
Yahoo's BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) even allows developers to customise their own results ranking, and so create bespoke search engines which can reflect the needs and interests of a particular search community.
"If the web community at large becomes niche-centric, then community search, for those people, could be much more effective than Google or any other search engine, said media consultant Mihaela Lica.
But, she pointed out, community-based search sites face problems when pursuing a relatively narrow audience.
Ever-decreasing relevance, when drilling down within certain socio-demographic groups, is one factor.
Once an algorithm is developed to appeal effectively to one sociological group, further subdivisions within that group become an issue; between male and female searchers, or young and old searchers, for example.
Ms Lica said there were practical problems as sites letting their narrow groups help refine results. In the case of Rushmore Drive she said "How would they know that the user who gets involved in the rating, searching, refining process is actually a member of the black community?"
And, she added, those who believe in the unifying power of the web may baulk at the notion of "black" and "white" search results.
She said: "Online we have no colour - 'segregating' knowledge is not something that gets my vote. Search results should be unbiased and impartial."

nod to Murray Dick and Mark Ward

Gasta Ready for the New search3.0 wave

At PubCon, Bruce Clay, Inc. President Bruce Clay presented at a session entitled "Top-Shelf Organic SEO" in which he discussed the approaching future of SEO as search engines evolve into more modern ranking methods. Bruce was good enough to take the time to speak with our own Michael McDonald in a one-on-one interview, which can be viewed in the video below.
Behavior Based Search

Bruce says that everybody who does a search will end up with different search results based on their prior search history. Personalization is going to be "web-wide" using third party cookies and things.

He provided a specific example of a search for "java". Some are looking for programming, some are looking for the beverage, and some are looking for travel information. Theoretically, the search engines will know that and provide results accordingly.

"We can't search for any term and look at rankings because I can get different results than you for exactly the same query. So that's going to change a lot," he says. It doesn't matter if you're logged into Google or not. Bruce believes that personalized results will be coming out within the first quarter of next year.

Intent-based Search

Google has been looking up your IP and revising results based on IP. They know where you're located and can make assumptions about the intent of your search. As you get more into intent-based search, it's going to change the way pages rank, Bruce explains. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query."

Where Does this Leave the SEO Crowd?

"Ranking is dead," says Bruce, recalling his words from his presentation. Going forward, he says you're going to have to look at analytics, measure traffic, bounce rates, action, etc. SEOs will have to ask themselves questions like:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?

- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?

Bruce thinks that in the first six months of 2009, we're going to see a lot more implementation of behavior and intent-based search leading to a mindset of "ranking is dead, and traffic is all that matters."

Universal Search

Bruce ClayBruce says this will be the most significant factor of 2009. Google looks at soundtracks and convert them to text. They can jump into the middle of videos, scan sites to determine if you have video/images or not. There are a lot of variables in universal search, and some of these variables tell how engaging your site is.

If you don't have video and your competition does, Bruce thinks we're going to see a big shift in rankings. He thinks if the top ten sites don't have video, they may lose their ranking over night.

Bruce notes that Google has been testing some of these variables, and will really start testing them a lot more in the first quarter, once the holidays are out of the way. He mentions the criticism Google took over the Florida Update, which took place in the month of November, and believes the company wants to avoid that again. He thinks we're going to see a lot of "Google Dances" early in the year though.

The Impact on Spam

According to Bruce, this is all going to really help Google fight spammers. He says it will affect the way scrapers and spammers work, because if they are just scraping text, they wouldn't be able to rank.

He also says that all of the variables that come into play may diminish the value of linking, which will certainly not help the spammers' cause either. He says it will be a big win for Google, and big win for the searchers.

There's no question that if everything Bruce talked about comes true, the SEO world will be turned on its ear. Bruce says, "If you're not ready for it as an SEO, you're gonna lose."