The editorial discusses Google Print, and its aims to digitise the collections of major libraries. Google’s efforts are seen as more significant than those which have gone before due to the scale of Google’s effort as well as technology and funding which are in a completely different class to what has gone before. Google’s work is also viewed as a potential precursor to digitisation efforts by other major organisations such as Microsoft and Yahoo.

In the USA government documents are in the public domain and so Government libraries contain vast quantities of free information waiting to be made accessible by those searching online. It is noted that commercial enterprises have been exploiting this data for some time and charging for access to it and that it is possible that Google’s project could impact that business model.

Google’s Mission:

to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

A number of current hurdles to Government information being made easily made accessible to all online are noted:

• Internet access
• Document authentication
• Preservation of digital documents

The fact that there are a number of solutions to the last two points, and the first is likely to be a transitory problem is not discussed. Making Government documents online is going to make them more accessible even to those without internet access, as they simply become more widely accessible throughout society.

Farrell states in the article that:

I want to reach out to those who believe that the Internet has everything or that Google constitutes a thorough search.

Surprisingly the answer of making Government information available online, in a way such that it can be indexed effectively by search engines, indexes, and other information organising enterprises such as those involved in tagging, local searching etc. isn’t proposed. The article is suggesting that there will still be a primary role for individual library catalogues, Government Publication Office catalogues and others, and that the question facing librarians is not how to get people the information they’re searching for but: “How do we get them beyond Google into library resources?”, which is more like: “How do we keep librarians and libraries in the loop?”. Sci7 believes the kind of questions that could have been asked would have included how can we enable others to interact with our information and catalogues more easily - how do we provide access to catalogue data in machine readable formats.

There is no clear separation in the article between past, present and future. While the resources of Google and others may be of value in digitising existing paper content, this is only applicable to the past. For the present and future ensuring that documents are made available in a timely fashion, indexed / tagged / described and linked appropriately, and made available to webcrawling robots is of key importance. Once the information is out there - it is down to the search engines and other session initiation sites to ensure that content is presented when it is an appropriate response to a user query.

While preservation of documents is mentioned, the article does not discuss document formats, it appears that this question might be too contentious to be discussed with respect to a Government machine with much information entrapped in closed proprietary Microsoft formats.

Lastly two questions are raised, apparently as threats: “How do we serve patrons whom we never see?” and “How do we justify services and resources in an online environment?”, whereas Sci7 would counter that making information available online actually makes it possible to “see” a lot more about information users than ever before, the potential for detailed statistics and usage tracking makes informed judgements on questions such as value for money being provided by “library” services easier. A key missing, but related question is one of privacy - should the Government be tracking everyone who requests a particular Government document - what should they be allowed to do with that information, for how long should it be stored, etc. The American Government’s power to access library records has been a major issue in the debate on the extension of the Patriot Act’s powers in this area. The potential for such invasion of privacy may well be extended by the increased digitisation of Government documents and any discussion of Government information being made available online is incomplete without considering this important area which could significantly affect how individuals choose to interact with Government information.

Prior to her position at Wyoming Farrell was librarian and “Internet Consultant” at the USA Government Printing Office and Head of Government Publications at the University of Nevada.

Link to article: DOI: doi:10.1016/j.giq.2005.03.002

Tags:Librarian | Libraries | SEO | Sci7

The researchers used eye tracking technology to assess how users interpret the information on Google’s search results page. Their results indicate that gender and task do affect the way in which users evaluate search results as revealed both by their eye movements and other actions.

Key general findings (as selected by Sci7)

• Only in one fifth of cases were users observed to read the results in the order in which they are presented
• On average three of the results on a search engine results page were read
• No subjects went beyond the third results page.
• Most of the subjects viewed (not clicked) the first and second results quite equally.
• Subjects clicked on the first result most of the time.
  Though the fraction of users clicking the first result was clearly recorded by the researchers, this interesting statistic did not make the paper.
• On more than half of the search sessions, users chose to revise the query terms without clicking on any link.
  This emphasises the importance of information, such as the first 90 or so characters of the title, META description and URL, which are often included on the search engine results page.

This work utilises a simple and well established broad classification of the types of tasks that users may be trying to achieve when using a search engine, these classes are:

• Navigational - The search engine is being used to help a user get to a specific page that the user already knows exists and is aiming for
• Transactional - The search engine is used as a step in an online transaction eg. The user wants to make a purchase / reservation / send a message.
• Informational - The search engine is used assist a user find information that they are looking for.

The scale of this research, as with many studies on online behaviour appears tiny, this paper is based on the results derived from only 23 individuals, ~400 Google queries, and ~600 Google results pages.

The researchers wrote navigational and informational tasks to be completed by their student test subjects. Navigational tasks were to get to a particular page eg. “Find the homepage of Michael Jordan, the statistician”, and informational tasks required the discovery online of the answers to factual questions such as: “Where is the tallest mountain in NY located?”.

Two minutes were given to answer each query, eye tracking and transaction log data were recorded. Eye-tracking hardware and software was from A.S.L . Three different types of “looking” at ten regions of interest on the screen, corresponding to each of the natural search results on the results page were recorded. The visual interaction with each region being either a saccade (very brief look less than 50 ms), fixation (at least 200 ms on a region) , or a scanpath (a sequence of fixations) was recorded. Pupil dilation was also recorded as a measure of the interest a subject was taking in a particular page. The accuracy of the equipment did not enable determination of if the subject was reading the snippet, title, url or other element of each result. There was no mention in the paper of Google adverts, this is an odd omission.

ANOVA and Chi squared analysis was used to determine if results obtained for the different gender and task classes were significantly different. These statistical measurements do not take into account the sample size relative to the number of individuals conducting web searches in the real world when assessing relevance - any significance found only refers to the small experimental sample. While task success rates were not significantly different based on either task or gender, the manner in which the search engine results page was interpreted varied. Actions in which there was a significant (at the 0.01 level) difference between males and females included:

• Females clicked on the second link twice as often as males. (Males clicked the second link 7% of the time compared to females’ 14.5%.)
• Males viewed more results pages than females.
• Females repeatedly viewed the same result more often than men.
• Males were more likely to click on the lower ranking links (links 7,8,9,10) on a results page, these include those scrolling was required to reveal in the test environment, though males were more likely than females to follow link 6 too - though the difference wasn’t statistically significant - suggesting “Males are more likely to click lower ranking links”, is a more defensible conclusion, than “Males are more likely to click links they have scrolled to reveal”.

General additional observations included : “Males look at a greater number of abstracts and also spend more time examining the result page in general [than females]”.

In terms of differences between tasks, no “transactional” tasks were evaluated, while Sci7 can understand that it may have been impractical (expensive) to get test subjects to make an online purchase for example, and many other transactional tasks require registration / signup etc. the reasons for this omission should have been discussed in the paper. Such work could have been quite informative and could have looked at questions such as at what stage the different groups used search engines during the transaction.

The results for the navigational tasks were as intuitively expected:

“Intuitively, a greater proportion of time is spent on Google result pages for navigational tasks since navigational questions do not require much additional scrutiny on web documents outside of Google; once the appropriate query result is found, one immediately has the answer for the navigational query.”

The statements in the above quote are backed up by the statistical data presented.

Interestingly the paper currently under review refers to earlier work which estimated that in 2000, 1 in 28 of all web page views were of search engine results pages. Reference: Jansen, B. J., & Pooch, U. (2000). Web user studies: a review and framework for future work. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 52(3), 235–246.

The academic home page of the first author Lori Lorigo (It is normal academic practice that the first author is the one who has done the bulk of the work):
http://www.hci.cornell.edu/people/lorigo.htm

Sci7 has emailed Lori Lorigo inviting her to comment on this article, specifically on:

1. The omission of any mention of Google Ads. Were users instructed not to click ads?. Where the ads present during the experiment?
2. Did the Google funding come with any conditions? - Is this the reason ads were not mentioned / discussed?
3. Why transactional queries were not investigated.
4. What is the fraction of users who clicked, the first link, the second link etc. ?

DOI link to reviewed paper: 10.1016/j.ipm.2005.10.001

At the time of writing the author’s home and publications page are the only results on Google for a search for the article title, suggesting Sci7 is the first to critically review or cite this work online:

Sci7’s web-optimization services are informed by an awareness of online trends as well as published and proprietary research.

Technorati Tags: Google | Google+Rank | Usability | Search.

The findings are largely unsurprising, with the popularity of numbers generally decreasing with size, powers of ten being more common than their neighbours, and various “special” numbers being particularly common, groups of special were identified as:

• Powers of 10
• Multiples of 10 and 5
• Easy to remember or symmetric numbers eg. 666 and 131313
• Powers of 2
• Numbers with strong associations eg. 666
• Popular zip codes eg. 78701
• Toll free telephone number prefixes eg. 866, 877
• Important historical dates eg. 1812
• Serial numbers of popular products 747, 8086
• Initial parts of mathematical constants 314159

The data was collected in the second week of December 2004, the number “2004″ was present at a particularly high frequency (3,030,000,000 pages), with a rapid fall off in popularity of future years.

Sci7 has at the begining of the second week of December 2005 obtained a page count for the years 1990-2015:

The top result for all the years to-date is the Wikipedia article for the year, the results for the years to come varies and includes the official london2012 site for 2012 and 2015.com. The popularity of the current year and fall off in future years is also seen in the above table. It is interesting to note that the current page count for “2004″ in December 2005 is 0.7 of what is was in December 2004. This could be interpreted as suggesting the web, as reflected in Google’s index is being purged of outdated information, or could be a reflection of the number of sites which display the current year on them for various reasons. 1992 is slightly anomalous in that there are currently more pages on Google referring to it than 1993.

The accuracy of Google’s number of pages returned count is incredibly not discussed, and neither is Google’s progress as of 2004 towards its stated aim of making the entirety of the world’s information searchable, and the bias of the current incomplete index of all human knowledge which Google holds.

Sci7 is able to produce datasets such as those used for the research discussed here (and those with much greater complexity) from a wide variety of sources.

A free full text PDF of the original article is available:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0504185

Data from Altavista

The research discussed is based on analysis of users of the Altavista search engine, the paper states that data was obtained from Altavista “transaction logs” from 2002. The fact that this data is not recent is one weakness of the research conducted, though the fact that at the time Altavista had a larger fraction of search users than it can now boast is given to support the use of this dataset. The logs are for a 24h period, taken on a Sunday, it is possible that weekend search queries are different to weekday ones, this isn’t an issue addressed by this research. Interestingly the analysis was affected by the presence of automated searches that were being submitted to Altavista. Sci7 believes the method used for removing such ‘robot’ derived hits was dubious in that all sessions of more than one hundred queries were removed. Sci7’s believes smarter techniques for identifying robots such as looking for very short intervals between queries, and using “User Agent” may have been more appriopriate. The apparent assumption that users have unique IP addresses could well have resulted in significant chunks of the user base such as those in institutions using web-caching, and those using certain ISPs being excluded from the dataset by being identified as robots by the techniques applied.

Conflict of Interest?

It is perhaps likely that Altavista would make such out dated information available for academic research, however the fact one of the authors, Pendersen works for Yahoo which provides the search function on Altavista, is presumably the situation which enabled the data to be obtained for the study. The potential for a conflict of interest should be considered when considering the results of the paper discussed here.

User Behaviour

The research focuses on how users interact with search engines, looking at areas such as multitasking - what else users are doing while they’re involved in a search session, and the type of queries that they are using.

Key findings presented included:

• Sessions ranged in duration from less than a minute to a few hours.
• In only 19% of two-query sessions were both queries on the same topic.
• 91.3% of three or more query sessions included multiple topics.
• There are a broad variety of topics in multitasking search sessions.

A session is defined as : “…the entire series of queries submitted by a user during one interaction with the Web search engine. Session length varied from less than a minute to a few hours.”. Sci7 would have been given more confidence by a rigourous definition based on the method used to identify queries from the same session from the raw transaction logs.

A key question is if the multiple search terms are devised to try and find the same information for the user, the suggestion is made - due to other referenced research that the multiple topics are due to users seeking a range of different information within the session. This referenced work includes studies carried out on data from other search engines including Excite and Alltheweb. These sources suggest that an average “multitasking” search session involves two topics. This is a bit of an odd statistic as if a single query session is the most common, two queries the next most common and further multiples of queries even less common it is clear that the most popular “multitasking” query is one with two queries.

An sample of “multitasking’ is given in the paper:

In Example 1, the user ranged over more than three topics during a period of 11 minutes from crystal meth to ephedrine then catwoman and finally plastic surgery.

Sample Size

A random set of sessions were taken from the dataset obtained from altavista, and split depending on the number of queries per session. The sets then obtained were tiny - only 254 two query sessions, 206 of which were determined to be “multitasking” for example. 254 sessions is in the view of Sci7 far too small a dataset from which to draw conclusions of any sort when compared to the 250 million searches per day in 2003 on Google and partners reported by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch (Searchenginewatch.com), citing Google itsself as the source of that number.

Importance

An apparent important omission from this paper appears to be the relative number of single query sessions, without this information it is difficult to judge the importance of the research presented here on multi query sessions. The only evidence given related to this crucial question is derived from an Excite user survey which is a rather different approach to data collection than log analysis. The Excite survey revealed 96.2% of sessions were single session queries, bringing the impact of research, such as that being reviewed here focused on the remaining 3.8% (11 out of 287) into question.

Author’s Recommentations

A number of recommendations are made, these are commented on below:

• Provide users with the ability to access, refine, and use results from a previous searches within the confines of a session across multiple topics.
  What comes out from the research is in fact that where this is done it should be done with care as the previous results within the session are unlikely to be related.
• Assist users in coordinating multiple topics into effective queries (i.e., search histories, various thesauri or keyword generation tools).
  There are two options here, one is to bring multiple topics together, the other is to keep them separate, and to ensure that sequential searches are generally treated independently, or at least the opportunity to treat them independently is maintained.
• Provide searchers the ability to create multiple sets of working notes related to different or related search topics (i.e., sketching, hyper-linking, and note creation tools).To allow multiple distinct sets of any such notes is I think the key point here, and one not well made by the recommendations.
• Enable the submission and tracking of multiple queries concurrently on different or related topics. There is a basis for this, but research on fraction of sessions which involve multiple searches should be reviewed in order to determine the prominence such features should be given.
• Allow for searching multiple search engines or collections concurrently on multiple topics.No data on users using multiple search engines or collections concurrently is introduced within this paper
• Enable the reformulation of multiple queries on different or related topics.What search engine doesn’t provide this functionality?
• Provide windowing facilities to allow Web users to generate and track separate topic or related topic queries and facilitate topic switching.Again, this appears a sensible suggestion, but the evidence provided suggests that this will only be required by the minority of users engaged in multi-query search sessions, so should perhaps not be present in a “default” or “simple” search interface
• Enable the generation and comparison of relevance judgments from different or related searches.Allowing for either different or related searches appears sensible
• Enable the tracking, storing and manipulating retrieved results and printouts related to different topics over multiple searches.Printouts?!, no evidence is presented that users print their search results, or that people store search results, this recommendation appears well beyond the scope of of the research either conducted or referenced
• Provide the ability to create clusters of retrieved information related to different topics.This is absolutely indicated, but really only becomes important when the search interface is such that searches are “remembered” and past searches influence future results. If retrieved information is to be stored, then it should be clustered into various different topics.

Sci7’s Summery

While much of the above suggestions appear sensible, many do not appear to directly follow from the research results described in the paper, and are therefore simply opinions and suggestions, the fact they appear in a “research paper” should not give them undue credibility.

The key finding of this research can be summarised as:
When users enter multiple queries within a session they are highly likely (81.1% if two queries, 91.3% if three) to be unrelated queries not on the same topic.

In Sci7’s view the key recommendation coming out of this work is that simply that this pattern of behaviour should be recognised. User interfaces of search engines should not make the apparently unfounded assumption that sequential queries in the same session will be on the same topic. In practice this means that options such as “search within results”, and “conduct this same search on another database” should be given lesser prominence than options to simply start a new search from scratch.

Sci7’s advice and recommendations are based on a scientific, evidence based approach to the optimisation of online services, derived from both propriety and published research.

Google

Google’s emergence into the search engine scene was an important occurance in the history of search on the web. The founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote a paper describing the first incarnation of their search engine when the internet application was a prototype located at Stanford University, here this paper is discussed by Sci7 Ltd.

Session Initiation

In this paper they noted that people were likely to surf the web, following links from one page to another, starting their journey at either a directory or search engine. Search engines have since become the most popular starting point for a “web session”. Other starting points have emerged such as RSS newsreaders which alert users to fresh content on sites which they are interested in, there are also a variety of “push” technologies which have a similar effect on the initiation of the browsing experience as RSS. Institutional intranet pages, and email clients (web based or not) are also current significant starting points, though many of these will themselves be portals including feeds (content supplied by push, or push-like technology)”, search boxes, and directories. Novel manners in which surfing sessions are emerging, in many European cities when you enter your phone will receive a text advertising what’s available locally, these message can include web-links. When wireless users connect to networks they are often first presented with a splash registration page from the network provider. Future initiation events might include brining a certain product into proximity of a computer, the product could be detected by its internal RFID tags, or by image recognition via a webcam.

PageRank

Brin and Page’s paper introduced the basis of PageRank, where information present in terms of which pages and sites link to each other is extracted and interpreted. It is worth noting that this paper was not the first to describe using what the paper describes as ” “, for determining the relative relevance of pages. Three groups of people who had previously described such techniques are cited:

• Ellen Spertus. ParaSite: Mining Structural Information on the Web. The Sixth International WWW Conference (WWW 97). Santa Clara, USA, April 7-11, 1997.
• Massimo Marchiori. The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines. The Sixth International WWW Conference (WWW 97). Santa Clara, USA, April 7-11, 1997.
• Jon Kleinberg, Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment, Proc. ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998.
• Ron Weiss, Bienvenido Velez, Mark A. Sheldon, Chanathip Manprempre, Peter Szilagyi, Andrzej Duda, and David K. Gifford. HyPursuit: A Hierarchical Network Search Engine that Exploits Content-Link Hypertext Clustering. Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Hypertext. New York, 1996.

There is also a reference in the paper to the way in which the relevance and importance of academic papers has been assessed by the number of references to them in other academic papers. In the academic world this approach is known to have a number major flaws, one is that a particular type of paper tends to get a disproportionate number of citations - that’s one describing how to do a particular type of experiment for the first time, that’s because from then on all scientists using that technique cite the original paper. Google’s PageRank takes into account both the number of links coming to a page, and the PageRank of the pages on which those inbound links were found.

Link Text

The second technique, used by the prototype Google in addition to PageRank, is analysis of the link text, the text enclosed by the anchor tags. The paper describes the association of such link text with both the page that it is on, and the page it links to. This makes sense as link text is usually “important”, in that it is highlighted, like titles, URLs, capitalised text, headings, and other specially tagged text, the use of such indicators is also mentioned in the paper. The Google founders also note that the link text is likely to offer a better description of the target page content than can be obtained from the target page, the fact that content such as images which contain no inherent descriptive textual descriptive content can be associated with the link text of inbound links.

Updates

The reason behind the three month update cycle at Google, and one purpose of the “see more results” link is revealed by the article, one is that indexes need to be rebuilt and this takes time, and another is that a first pass of the results takes place on pre-computed collections of data, and only if that is insufficient is the whole dataset queried.

Google Local

Even this first incarnation of Google is revealed to make use of proximity in ordering the search results, though it is almost certain that at this stage this was at the country level, rather than the city / street level that is emerging with Google local and other services.

The prototype Google described had a databank of 24 million web pages 147GB, which appears decidedly tiny compared to current data storage requirements for even highly specialised crawling options.

Feedback

The fact that the amount of traffic a page receives should ideally be taken into account in producing the search results is discussed. At the time though Google did not have access to such information, as of 2005 Google tracks which sites people click to from the Google results (and tracks Google Toolbar users to a greater degree). The tracking information can be used to infer the traffic to various sites, as well as provide a way of determining the relevance of search results. This feedback loop, where commonly clicked links are promoted is known to be used for advert positioning by Google - its use in the search results has not yet been confirmed, though Sci7’s internal (ongoing) research reveals indications that it is occurring.

Some key points about Google’s data management revealed:

• Whenever Google comes across a new URL in a page a unique ID number is assigned to that URL.
• Crawled documents are stored in a compressed form (zlib) on Google’s servers.
• Each document is split into chunks, these are ranked depending how far into the document they occur, and how they are tagged.
• These chunks are then grouped.
• Links are extracted from the crawled document and placed in another file(index), along with the link text, source and destination.
• Relative URLs are corrected into absolute URLs.
• A database of pairs of ID numbers (linked pages) is created, this is an element of the raw data on from which PageRank is calculated.

Metadata is described as a poor source of information for determining relevance as poor, as information not visible to the user is often used intentionally to attempt to manipulate search results.

Challenges for a Search Engine

The paper gives much insight into what the challenges faced by a search engine are: “One of the main causes of this problem is that the number of documents in the indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude, but the user’s ability to look at documents has not. People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.” This problem can be viewed from the point of view of an organisation or individual running a website - if you’re not in the top thirty or so results on the popular search engines for relevant search terms then you won’t get much traffic from them. This problem might be lessened with localisation technology, many searches are naturally localised, localisation can reduce the number of documents from which your search results are to be selected.

Googlebot

The Google web crawler, now known as the Googlebot is discussed.

• It is made of a number of machines, URL servers, and URL grabbers
• The machines which get the data hold DNS caches
• The code for this element of the operation is written in Python

Crawling problems are also discussed, in that crawling an online game resulted in problems as the Googlebot presumably behaved like a crazed player following allsorts of links. Sci7 has been made aware of a re-emergence of this kind of problem when companies run the Google search appliance within their company networks, or from IP addresses which are logged into online applications.

Even this early prototype reveals the use of “trusted feedback”, in the this case just for evaluation of the results, presumably for improving the algorithm. However Sci7 now believes Google uses a large number of individuals to manually check results, primarily for the purpose of removing search engine spam from the system, Sci7 customers get the benefit from our knowing the criteria used by these individuals to assess sites.

Google Rank

The paper uses as an example throughout the name of the then current US president, highlighting the fact the top result as whitehouse.gov as evidence that the search engine is working well. While this is the case with the current president the other results are interesting with bushorchimp.com coming in at number four, and much has been made of “google bombs” such as:
http://www.google.com/search?q=failure
These effects are created by many people online creating links with to the Whitehouse official biography of George W Bush using the word failure as the link text as has been done in this sentence.

Forward Looking

Much is also made in this early paper about the scalability of the techniques used, steps such as designing their own operating system capable of dealing with very large files, and use in a failure tolerant distributive environment. Thinking about the future is clearly important for all organisations involved in online technologies where the future has a tendency to arrive very quickly.

Sci7

Sci7 provides website optimisation consultancy, tools, and software, among its portfolio of services and information products details on the http://www.google.com/base/, a system which gives content providers the ability to upload content directly to a database hosted by Google. Many types of content can be submitted to the database, ideally in a format which makes it easy for Google’s search methods to supply the data in search results when it is relevant to do so. It is possible to tag and describe the information that you are uploading so that it’s relevance and connection with other data can be “understood” by Google’s computers.

This can be best seen with an example, Google suggests that information on jobs available is submitted to their database with the information contained within descriptive tags such as:

<g :job_industry> </g>
<g :employer> </g>
<g :job_function> </g>
<g :job_type> </g>
<g :salary> </g>
<g :salary_type> </g>
<g :education> </g>
<g :immigration_status> </g>
<g :location> </g>

There are also formats for scientific research data (which if used may well result in relevant information being available via a Google Scholar search), as well as formats for describing products and services and a vast amount of other types of data, such as addresses which can be searched by Google local. The scheme is expandable with the opportunity to add new descriptive tags for different types of content. Products added to the Google database may, if relevant, appear in Froogle search results.

Sci7 is able to offer a number of services to enable organisations to ensure that they are supplying their content to Google, and the other search engines and information organising sites on the web. In terms of the Google database we offer the automated translation of existing web/database content into formats optimized for submission to the Google database, we will also manage regular automated updates of your organization’s Google database content.

These services are available in a variety of formats depending on your organization’s needs:

• As part of a broader website / search engine optimization package.
• As custom designed modifications / add-ons to your existing IT systems
• As a stand alone service where Sci7 automatically obtains relevant information from your website, refactors and repackages and submits it to the Google database at an appropriate frequency.

Frequently asked client questions:

We are already supplying product information to Froogle, how does this affect me?
There is now an opportunity to improve the machine readability of your product feed, and to include a broader range of information on your company and its products and services.

My organization’s RSS feeds are already automatically picked up by Google and appear in various search results, do I need to submit them to the Google database?
The Google database now provides you with more control over how and when your information reaches Google. If your feed is not being consumed by Google regularly enough, the new services enable you to push your feed to Google. RSS feeds are an extensible format - new descriptive elements can be added within them, with the public launch of the Google database many such tags, which Google “understands” have been released, Sci7 is able to optimise your feeds to include information presented in the required format.

Why?
To make sure links to your site / content appear when relevant search terms are entered into Google, particularly its specialised search tools such as Google Local, Google Scholar, Froogle etc.

Who?
Everyone! Google’s database can host information about products and services which are not available on the web. Sci7 is able to assist and advise the full range of organisations who can benefit from optimized management of the data held on them in the Google database, from small companies with no or little IT experience to large technologically savvy organisations.

Googlebase | GOOG | SEO | Google

Typically “Web 2.0″ is considered to be made up of websites and applications which have certain features shared by a number of currently successful sites. In a September 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly entitled What is Web 2.0 attempted to define some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies. He identified sites such as Flickr and Wikipedia were part of “Web 2.0″, and compared them to their Web 1.0 “predecessors” Ofoto and Britannica Online respectively. Looking at those examples it is possible to see how there are common features such as:

• User generated / “owned” content.
• Easy automated interaction between sites via APIs, Feeds, RPIs etc.
• Community / Participation.
• Standards compliance.
• Separation of content from presentation.
• Some rights reserved licensing.

A common question is “How can we join in?”. And that is something that Sci7 has been helping companies with for some years now. Enabling users to add comments to sites, producing not only your latest articles in RSS (or other) feeds, but also your comments and perhaps search results via OpenSearch. Do you make the raw content product catalogue available to tech savvy customers and modern search engines in XML format so they can use it in the way that they want or do you force them through your own interface?

The barrier to getting involved in “Web 2.0″ is small, even adding comments and trackbacks to articles on a corporate website in a manner that “Bloggers” have been using for many years now is making an nod in the right direction. The very nature of Web 2.0 applications, enables small entities to rapidly place themselves right in the middle of things by providing a useful service eg. Pingomatic.com, or simply brining a collection of “Web 2.0″ applications together to create a new one greater than the sum of its parts.

Web 3.0

Often Web 2.0 discussions involve AJAX (explained below), and some AJAX applications are firmly in the Web 2.0 arena, such as those enabling live updates of RSS feeds or search results as new information becomes available. However what we see AJAX being used for is altogether more interesting, and might well be giving us a glimpse of what Web 3.0 will be about: Instantly responsive online applications, or perhaps more accurately: Apparently instantly responsive remote interactive applications.
Google Suggest is an example of an application where a remote application gives local PC like levels of interactivity.

Moving towards the point where online services become the norm, and the ultimate thin client that is the web-browser will become ever more capable of providing more users with access to the tools that they require.

Google Earth and Google Suggest are perhaps transitional applications which are giving us the first glimpse of what web 3.0 might offer. While true web applications function through a browser, but there are some emerging application which are way ahead of the curve, such as Google Earth and Skype which while closely integrated with the web, currently require dedicated client side applications to be run.

What is AJAX

AJAX, a term describing the use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, was coined by Jesse Garret in February of 2005, in an online essay entitled “AJAX: A New Approach to Web Applications”. Since then the strict definition proposed by Garrett has been relaxed in common usage to cover online applications which typically have the following key characteristics:

• Personal computer like levels of interactivity with remote applications
• Standards compliant presentation
• Dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model
• Data interchange and manipulation using open structured data interchange formats
• Asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest
• Client side scripting binding everything together

Tracking

Web 2.0 requires smarter interpretation of statistics, polling AJAX applications, RSS feed readers and other services will result in various new types of traffic on your webserver. As these routes of getting your site / brand / message out become more important it may be necessary to revisit some of the more traditional ways of reporting traffic on websites, as more and more ways are provided for users to interact with data provided by an organisation producing meaningful web-stats becomes more of a challenge. Your webserver could be hit once by a site syndicating your content which could then cascade it on to many of its own users, perhaps along with your own advertising - though Google’s patent application Embedding advertisements in syndicated content if awarded and upheld could dampen uptake of such approaches (or at least limit you to using Google Ads in conjunction with them).

Sci7 has expertise in Business Blogging, OpenSearch, RSS and many other technologies that underlie the cutting edge of the web today.

Technorati Tags: Web+2.0 | Web2.0 | AJAX | Web+3.0.

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