A couple of years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Life, the Universe, and SEO” in which I considered Google’s relationship with the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. Specifically, I compared it to the relationship that Deep Thought, the computer in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, has with the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, [...]

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Heading to Punta Cana for a week. Feel free to keep writing great comments — will catch up when I get back!

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Unless you’ve been living in a cone of silence, you’ve probably heard about the epic war of words between Google and Bing. But just in case, here’s a quick summary: Amit Singhal, Google Fellow: “Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it“: Bing is using some combination of: Internet Explorer 8, which can send data [...]

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Last October, a certain blogger said: LinkedIn needs to implement some kind of concept extraction to provide a useful topic facet (something I’d also love to see for their regular people search). This is a challenging information extraction problem, especially for the open web, but I also know from experience that it is tractable within a domain. [...]

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