Search Technology Archives

How Do Users Interact with Predictive (Queryless) Search?

February 1, 2016 by Justin

The growth of mobile and the prevalence of personalization data has empowered the growth of proactive search systems, which push out information in a predictive fashion. While reactive search (user enters a query) remains the dominant aspect of search, platforms like Google Now and Microsoft Cortana are increasing the sophistication and frequency in which users interact with …

Is App Indexing Coming to iOS?

February 4, 2015 by Justin

App indexing has the ability to dramatically change the way we engage with search, but, unfortunately, it has been limited to Android apps since launch. However, it looks like that may be changing soon. Annotations for iOS App Indexing Appearing on The Web Today I’m seeing examples of possible iOS app indexing annotations appearing up …

How do users interact with SERPs on mobile devices?

December 16, 2014 by Justin

As search becomes increasingly mobile, getting closer to being the majority of search visits every month, how we think about user engagement on search results needs to be updated from the old desktop paradigms of the Golden Triangle (which suggest attention sticks to the upper left and decays down and to the right). Mobile search use …

Talking Back To Conversational Search

November 17, 2014 by Justin

Search is becoming increasingly conversational in nature, and the growth of mobile in search is only perpetuating this trend (and the technology that powers it). This shift in search is fundamentally changing how content is discovered, crawled, indexed, understood, and ranked. To understand where SEO is going next, it’s important to understand some of the …

A Better Understanding of Personalized Search

June 24, 2013 by Justin

Over the years, search results have become increasingly complex and that trend is likely to continue. The traditional model of 10 blue links and rank checking is no longer accurate as users are receiving results that are increasingly customized to them. As results are becoming more personalized, it’s valuable to better understand how personalized search results are being presented to users.

How Does Google Authorship Impact CTR?

June 3, 2013 by Justin

At the end of last week, some discussion on Hacker News started after a post claimed that Authorship created a 90% drop in traffic. Later, Matt Cutts jumped in to note that it was Penguin and not Authorship that caused the drop. I thought it would be useful to talk about how social annotation is …

Google Domain Clustering Update?

August 7, 2018May 21, 2013 by Justin

A week ago, Matt Cutts posted a video discussing what SEOs could expect in the coming months. One of the mentioned updates was around host or domain clustering / crowding. I think some type of domain crowding update went out, starting last night. Hat tip to Jason Mun for noticing. Specifically what Matt Cutts said about …

How to Visualize Open Site Explorer Data in Gephi

May 16, 2012 by Justin

Graph theory is fundamental to most of the work done in SEO and social media. Everything from PageRank, EdgeRank, spam analysis, clustering, and implicit / explicit social graphs are all built on graph theory. Although successful SEO can be executed without ever knowing the difference between a node and an edge, a basic understanding of graph theory can help an SEO make the intellectual leap to better understand how search engines can view and analyze data.

Entity Search Results

October 6, 2018January 10, 2012 by Justin

Entities. They’re nothing new in SEO, but over the last year, I’ve been ruminating on how moving into entities should fundamentally be changing the way most of us are still thinking about SEO. To start, let’s first step back and look at the history of the algorithms. Moving from Pages to Entities In the early …

Methods for Evaluating Freshness

November 4, 2011 by Justin

To set the stage, yesterday Google announced a new “Freshness” Update, which had an effect on 35% of all queries. Barry wrote a great post about it on Search Engine Land and Rand and Mike followed up with a great Whiteboard Friday documenting some of the early observations from SEOs. But beyond the news of the update, I’d like to look at some of the potential methodologies used by search engines to implement this update.