This document summarizes notes from a conference or workshop on search engine optimization and user experience. It discusses various topics around how search engines work, personalization of search results, and Google's approach to personalization. It also mentions changes in search engine behavior over time and the importance of brands and trust.

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3. I work at Portent where I am lucky to work with smart people (and not just because
they help me with Excel).
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5. Funniest part: seeing IAs using the Toni Braxton store as an orientation point to find
the conference venue
Not-best-part: Getting locked out of my room in a 5000+ room hotel and having to
wait, wait, wait for someone to come and let me back in.
Best Part: getting called out by Rashmi Sinha in closing plenary for the call to action of
broadening scope to include search optimization
Some time after: Peter Morville comes up with “findability” and Lou Rosenfeld starts
his Search Metrics workshops.
This isn’t what I meant.
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Click Distance: the further from an authority page, the less
important it must be
URL Depth: the further from the homepage, the less important
it must be

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11. More images
More linked text
Sidebar navigation accompanies Global navigation
Yahoo becomes busier, more categories, international sites
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12. Apple capitalizes on new search technology with more heavily “designed” look
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13. Navigation dominance
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14. Apple introduces site navigation for the first time
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15. A true “home” page, start here and navigate to where you want to be
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16. Apple…not so much
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17. Broad band comes into its own and BIG pictures make a splash
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19. Why Google started moving away from link-based relevance
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26. I have presented at 2 UXPA DC UserFocus conferences Bird Bears Bs of Discoverability
(well attended sessions)
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29. Using the Internet: Skill Related Problems in User Online Behavior; van Deursen & van Dijk; 2009
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30. We’re constructing worse queries but feel that we’re getting better results.
Which canary in what coal mine just died?
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31. Pew Internet Trust Study of Search engine behavior
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Summary-of-
findings.aspx
In January 2002, 52% of all Americans used search engines. In February 2012 that
figure grew to 73% of all Americans. On any given day in early 2012, more than half of
adults using the internet use a search engine (59%). That is double the 30% of internet
users who were using search engines on a typical day in 2004. And people’s frequency
of using search engines has jumped dramatically.
Moreover, users report generally good outcomes and relatively high confidence in the
capabilities of search engines:
91% of search engine users say they always or most of the time find the information
they are seeking when they use search engines
73% of search engine users say that most or all the information they find as they use
search engines is accurate and trustworthy
66% of search engine users say search engines are a fair and unbiased source of
information
55% of search engine users say that, in their experience, the quality of search results is
getting better over time, while just 4% say it has gotten worse
52% of search engine users say search engine results have gotten more relevant and
useful over time, while just 7% report that results have gotten less relevant
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32. Pew Internet Trust Study of Search engine behavior
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Summary-of-
findings.aspx
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33. And Google’s response…
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34. Personalization of results
They Tracks: What is selected, Level of interaction, What is not-done (bounce rate) and use Signals: Location.
Search history
Dynamic query suggestions - displayed as searcher enters query
Calculation of information from 3 sources
User: previous search patterns
Domain: countries, cultures, personalities
GeoPersonalization: location-based results
Metrics used for probability modeling on future searches
Active: user actions in time
Passive: user toolbar information (bookmarks), desktop information (files), IP location, cookies
In 2002, Google acquired personalization technology Kaltix and founder Sep Kamver who has been head of
Google personalization since
Defines personalization: “product that can use information given by the user to provide tailored, more
individualized experience”
Personalization enables shorter, less specific queries set to change user behavior (easier, more natural
queries) = search shorthand
Tied direct user interaction with results (ability to promote/demote in results set, add comment)
discontinued because too noisy & interest did not always equal searching for topic and used by SEO
community for other purposes
Only enable if signed in
Only impacted future searches (if signed in)
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35. T
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36. User profile phases
1. Gather raw information
2. Construct profile from user data
3. Allow application to exploit profile to construct personal results
Keywords profiles represent areas of interest
Extracted from documents or directly provided by user, weights are numerical
representation of user interest
Polysemy is a big problem for KW profiles
Semantic networks
Filtering system
Network of concepts – unlinked nodes with each node representing a discrete concept
Used by alta vista (used header that represented user personal data, set of
stereotypes (prototypical user comprised of a set of interests represented by a
frame of slots
Each “slot” (made up of domain, topic & weight (domain =area of interest, topic =
specific term used to identify area of interest, weight = degree of interest) that
makes up frame weighted for relevance
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37. Jaime Teevan MS Research
(http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i141/f07/lectures/teevan_personalization.pdf)
Tools used
Software agents: most reliable as more control over install and application
Cookies: least invasive
Login: more pervasive across machines and time
Proxy Servers: limited to user register of machine with server
Session IDs: limited to a single session
Advantages: more data, better data (easier for system to consume and rationalize)
Disadvantage: user has no control over what is collected
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38. Advantage: User has more control over personal and private information
Disadvantage: compliance, users have a hard time expressing interests,
burdensome on user to fill out forms, false info from user
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39. Vince update 2009
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2288128/Vince-The-Google-Update-We-
Should-Be-Talking-About
Big brands can afford better sites
Big brands spend more $$ in adwords
“The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google
CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives
visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said
their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. …Brands
are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the
cesspool….Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human
existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component.” Eric Schmidt,
Google, October 2008
http://www.seobook.com/google-branding
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41. Google does not care about UX (just look at android)
Like it or not, part of Google’s evil strategy in selecting the UX community is because they
think that we have our heads in the clouds.
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42. And sort of blames SEO for it (not outright but in a passive/aggressive) kind
of way
2007 Google Patent: Methods and Systems for Identifying Manipulated
Articles (November 2007)
Manipulation:
• Keyword stuffing (article text or metadata)
• Unrelated links
• Unrelated redirects
• Auto-generated in-links
• Guestbook pages (blog post comments)
Followed up: Google Patent: Content Entity Management (May 2012)
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43. Entity=anything that can be tagged as being associated with certain documents, e.g.
Store, news source, product models, authors, artists, people, places thing
The entity processing unit looks at “candidate strings and compares to query
log to extract: most clicked entity, most time spent by user)
Query logs (this is why they took away KW data – do not want us to reverse engineer
as we have in past)
User Behavior information: user profile, access to documents seen as related to
original document, amount of time on domain associated with one or more entities,
whole or partial conversions that took place
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45. Receives the query
Applies user profile
Extracts query terms
Assigns entities
Identifies candidate synonyms (synonym database
Synonym engine assigns confidence score
phrase term order
placement on page (?)
using phrase engine (?) compound terms often found together
Compare to threshold
Satisfied – use revised query as well
Not satisfied – discard
Submit to index for SERP
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46. Screen capture of the software architecture from the patent filing
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48. http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
Douglas Bowman
on leaving as head of Google Visual Design (2009)
Tested 41 shades of blue
Debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels
wide, and was asked to prove my case.
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53. Answered for us and the client
Would this become the first deliverable after signing?
Precipitate the client questionnaire?
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54. If machines are methodical, as we’ve seen, and people are emotional, as we experience, where is the middle
ground? Are we working harder to really find what we need or just taking what we get and calling it what we wanted
in the first place?
Google Patents
•Improving Search using Population Information (November 2008)
•Rendering Context Sensitive Ads for Multi-topic searchers (April 2008)
•Presentation of Local Results (July 2008)
•Detecting Novel Content (November 2008)
•Document Scoring based on Document Content Update (May 2007)
•Document Scoring based on Link-based Criteria (April 2007)
Microsoft: Patents
Launches “decision engine” with focus on multiple meaning (contexts) as well as term indexing and topic
association and tracking
-Lead researcher Susan Dumais at the forefront of user behavior for prediction on search relevance
-Look to recent acquisition of Powerset (semantic indexing) and FAST ESP (semantic processing)
Calculating Valence of Expressions within Docum0ents for Searching a Document Index (March 2009): System
for natural language search and sentiment analysis through a breakdown of the valence manipulation in
document
Efficiently Representing Word Sense Probabilities (April 2009): Word sense probabilities stored in a semantic
index and mapped to “buckets.”
Tracking Storylines Around a Query (May 2008): Employ probabilistic or spectral techniques to discover themes
within documents delivered over a stream of time
Compares the query with the contents of each document to discover whether query exists implicitly or
explicitly in received document
Builds topic models
Consolidate the plurality of info around certain subjects (track stories that continue over time)
Collect results over time and sort (keeps track of the current themes and alerts to new)
Track
Rank (relevance)
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55. Present abstracts
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56. Users look to search engines for guidance. We can provide similar guidance with user controls
Tools
Suggestions as query is entered
At page search box
On search page
Spell check/correction
Best Bets
Augmented Search results
Awards
Display PageRank score
Sharing
User Ratings
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57. Jared Spool did a site search study some time ago that found users successful 37% of the time when
using site search and 50+% of the time when navigating
Users don’t like navigation at the outset but will use it if contextual and in a form that they can
influence
Buzzallions: Top Ranked, Bottom Ranked, Most Reviewed, Price: Low to High, Price: High to Low
Tools
Facets
Filters
More Like This…
Always have opportunity to clear selections, return to original state
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58. Remember that most of the site visitors do not come through the home page.
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59. Search Metrics SEO Correlation factors 2013
Spearman Correlation – study of google result
Keywords in title should be placed as close to front as possible
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60. A descriptive, keyword-rich page title brings strong relevance weight to the page. Page title is
the most important metadata field. It should always include the company name. It must map to
the page content; you can’t just stuff irrelevant keywords in there. It does not appear ON the
page [that is and <h1> tagged element within the <body> tags.
And, NO copy and paste please!
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61. Description may not have the favored status of <title>. Its importance comes in
another form, helping the user to decide if they want to click through to the
destination page.
One of the not-content elements that search engines note is how many people
click through to your site and how long they stay there before coming back. The
more “sticky” your site is, the better your chances of getting in front of people
who need to know.
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62. Image search accounts for nearly 6% of Google searches
That adds up to approximately 600 million searches in May 2009
Read by screen reader technology so cannot sound too weird
3/13/2014
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64. This client invests a lot of time and effort in their News & Events directory
Customers are viewing the utility pages (Contact, etc) and the product
justification/ROI section.
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66. Content Dashboard for Google Analytics
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=YNIE7uQ4R
i-xjSid7V-q6Q
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67. Mom and creampuffs
The search engines think that we’re superfluous because we don’t “get search” That’s
what I’m here to end. I want you to “get search.” We are information professionals, not
mice! We’re going to use every neuron, synapsis and gray cell to fight back.
We will shift from trying to optimize search engine behavior to optimizing what the
search engines consume, move from search engine optimization to information
optimization
We will Focus
We will be Collaborative
We will get Connected
We will stay Current
Because we are user experience professionals, not Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin or Larry
Page.
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