Marianne Sweeny's "SEO and IA: The Makings of A Beautiful Friendship"
Presentation Transcript
Second Life, Info Architecture island, 08-03-07
INTRODUCTION
Erich Hesse: Hi. – and welcome to this, the third presentation in our IA Summit Redux.
Erich Hesse: In First Life, my name is Eric Reiss and I’m president of the Information Architecture Institute.
Erich Hesse: Here in Second Life, I’m a completely inept avatar, so please forgive me if I fall off the stage.
Erich Hesse: I’d like to thank Stacy Surla from the Board of the Institute for arranging this series.
Erich Hesse: In fact, Stacy is the reason we have this island at all.
Erich Hesse: Many thanks also to Naomi Malone for managing the series.
Erich Hesse: Thank you so much for your efforts.
Erich Hesse: Moving on to tonight’s “main attraction”…
Erich Hesse: We are incredibly honored that Marianne Sweeny could join us this evening.
Erich Hesse: Marianne’s presentation on search engine optimization was one of the highlights of the recent
Erich Hesse: Summit.
Erich Hesse: And remember, we were in Las Vegas…
Erich Hesse: So Marianne was competing with Tom Jones, Celine Dion, and Tony Braxton.
Erich Hesse: For those of you who have already seen this presentation live…
Erich Hesse: …you know that Marianne is incredibly culturally literate.
Erich Hesse: Who else could work Saint Teresa into a presentation description?
Erich Hesse: These days, Marianne is an information architect and search specialist at Ascentium.
Erich Hesse: Ascentium is an agile consulting company with a slew of sexy interactive solutions.
Erich Hesse: In an earlier life – er…what’s that in relation to Second Life…?
Erich Hesse: In an earlier life, Marianne co-founded the Microsoft Information Architects.
Erich Hesse: This is a 300 member community dedicated to bringing the philosophy and best practices of IA to
Erich Hesse: the company.
Erich Hesse: She has also studied Library Science at the University of Washington…
Erich Hesse: …and is one of the world’s leading experts on search engine optimization.
Erich Hesse: So, without further ado, I’m delighted to present to you, Ms. Marianne Sweeny.
PRESENTATION
Searcher Shepherd: LOL...many thanks Eric. Toni and I remain friends in spite of that competition.
Searcher Shepherd: As for the world, it is in sad shape with me at the search optimization [SEO] helm.
Searcher Shepherd: However, like the chicken in the road trying to hold the sky up with its bird legs, i do what
Searcher Shepherd: i can
Searcher Shepherd: and my mission is to make sure that IA always has a place at the table when information
Searcher Shepherd: finding is being discussed
Searcher Shepherd: The title for this presentation comes from the movie "Casablaca" when the hero and his
Searcher Shepherd: former arch rival wal into the night together with a renewed understanding of their
Searcher Shepherd: relationship in light of a common enemy.
Searcher Shepherd: This is how I see IA, Interaction Design, User Experience Design and search technology.
Searcher Shepherd: New friends in light of a common enemy that is finding what we are looking for in a vast
Searcher Shepherd: sea of information.
Searcher Shepherd: Up to now, we have worked on a parallel track, the technology developing around us
Searcher Shepherd: while we create paths through the information space.
Searcher Shepherd: I believe that we can and must work with the technology to protect our ability to contribute
Searcher Shepherd: to the means by which our clients and patrons find information.
Searcher Shepherd: And I believe that it will be a beautiful friendship.
Searcher Shepherd: I would like to take your questions as they come up in this presentation
Searcher Shepherd: i have my chat window open
Searcher Shepherd: please preface your question or comment with MARIANNE: so that I will notice it as a
Searcher Shepherd: question and i'll answer it directly
Searcher Shepherd: and so to begin
Searcher Shepherd: First,I want to thank Stacy Narayan, Naomi Malone and the IA Institute for setting this up
Searcher Shepherd: and for working even harder to guide us in our ability to be here today.
Searcher Shepherd: I am Searcher Shepherd, have been an IA for 8 years and focused on search for the last
Searcher Shepherd: 3 years.
Searcher Shepherd: I am here today to talk about organic search engine optimization that is constructing and
Searcher Shepherd: amending sites to map to the functionality of search engine technology so that sites can
Searcher Shepherd: appear higher in the results sest for client search terms and phrases.
Searcher Shepherd: Our clients are using search rather than the elaborate pathways that we build. This
Searcher Shepherd: requires that we make room in our thinking for designs that acknowledge the search
Searcher Shepherd: tools.
Searcher Shepherd: Good SEO does not have to interfere or dictate IA – it is a composite of actions and best
Searcher Shepherd: practices that can ensure maximum visibility with peaceful coexistence.
Searcher Shepherd: Search puts wayfinding directly in the hands of the client - that is why they like it so much.
Searcher Shepherd: It is immediate. Revelatory by showing a lot of intepretations at once.Efficient, for known
Searcher Shepherd: item searches it cannot be beat.
Searcher Shepherd: Users can easily hop back and forth from the search results page to the site until they
Searcher Shepherd: find what they are looking for or iterate their search.
Searcher Shepherd: Ask.com saves them the effort of a click by showing a preview of the site.
Searcher Shepherd: Worst of all, search is indulgent. Google made it all look so easy now our clients expect
Searcher Shepherd: efficient, quick and plentiful results all of the time.
Searcher Shepherd: Close enough is often good enough. And, if it isn't, they turn to the most common
Searcher Shepherd: information finding tool...the person in the cubicle next to them.
Searcher Shepherd: And for this we can put the blame squarely on Google. Page and Brin creted PageRank
Searcher Shepherd: to combat spam. It seems that many were doing a poor job of honestly describing their
Searcher Shepherd: content. So, the system would figure out what is relevant to the client's query by counting
Searcher Shepherd: links. Because, links are the result of human thought plus human action...votes so-to-
Searcher Shepherd: speak.
Searcher Shepherd: However, PageRank has nothing to do with the client query. It is a pre-query value
Searcher Shepherd: calculated at indexing and recalculated periodically.
Searcher Shepherd: We also discovered that it is not flawless. A bunch of folks who use the same link and
Searcher Shepherd: target can make the #1 result for the search term "miserable failure" the autobiography
Searcher Shepherd: of American president George W Bush.
Searcher Shepherd: Here it is, the famous, to some infamous PageRank algorithm. This is its most stripped
Searcher Shepherd: down state. Rumor has it that the algorithm now has in excess of 27 components. We’ll
Searcher Shepherd: look at some of these extensions in a few moments.
Searcher Shepherd: When Google appears in 1998, it is the underdog to search giants like Alta Vista and
Searcher Shepherd: Yahoo! Its simplified relevance model with the foundation of human mediation through
Searcher Shepherd: linking [each link was at that time the product of direct human endeavor and so viewed as
Searcher Shepherd: a “vote” for the page or site relevance and information merit]
Searcher Shepherd: I read an interesting story about Larry Page and his PageRank -not named after him-
Searcher Shepherd: algorithm
Searcher Shepherd: he was evidently quite taken aback that other search technologies leveraged this
Searcher Shepherd: important finding after he and Brin published their initial paper.
Searcher Shepherd: This accounts for Google's "close to the chest" research and development.
Searcher Shepherd: One thing Google has given us is a base standard for relevance.
Searcher Shepherd: This has come at a price. One that we'll realize in a few minutes...depending on my
Searcher Shepherd: typing accuracy.
Searcher Shepherd: I believe that it is mandatory in all presentations to have a "dot oh" slide.
Searcher Shepherd: Here is mine, a gentle observation on what search has claimed as its own.
Searcher Shepherd: It harnesses the collective intelligence through linking and optimization.
Searcher Shepherd: It capitalizes on the architecture of participation through development of new an
Searcher Shepherd: innovative tools. Jimmy Wales is developing an open source search community to
Searcher Shepherd: liberate search from advertising dollars.
Searcher Shepherd: It takes data from a variety of sources and mashes it together to answer questions before
Searcher Shepherd: they come up. Google maps will show you what restaurants are near your movie.
Searcher Shepherd: And it liberates search from the desktop and brings it to mobile devices
Searcher Shepherd: Search 2.0 is about returning control of search to the user. PeopleRank, social search,
Searcher Shepherd: P2P, AJAX search applications are centered on the user interacting with the system in a
Searcher Shepherd: way that extends beyond the solitary box on the big white page
Searcher Shepherd: Next step is “meaning”
Searcher Shepherd: What I find most fascinating is that all of the roads seem to be leading to a form of human
Searcher Shepherd: intervention in serach results presentation. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame is developing
Searcher Shepherd: a peer-to-peer search solution that sees inviduals ranking search results and t his
Searcher Shepherd: information feeding display position moving forward. Now is an excellent time for us to
Searcher Shepherd: participate
Searcher Shepherd: Librarians wake up screaming when they dream of the emerging artificial intelligence of
Searcher Shepherd: search.
Searcher Shepherd: As the hardware gets cheaper [Google’s index is reputed to live on cheap PC servers
Searcher Shepherd: running open source software…many, many cheap PCs are needed to host a 9 billion
Searcher Shepherd: page inverted index and cache of all pages], the software becomes more sophisticated
Searcher Shepherd: with asynchronous as well as synchronous query calculations taking place.
Searcher Shepherd: The purpose of this consumption of processing power is to formulate enough brute
Searcher Shepherd: strength to actually derive contextual meaning through rapid and multiple comparisons.
Searcher Shepherd: Machines do not have a sense of “place”, emotion, or awareness, all of which feed our
Searcher Shepherd: contextualizing of language into personal meaning. Windows Live search does not know
Searcher Shepherd: the difference between dog as it applies to the canine, the bounty hunter in Hawaii or a
Searcher Shepherd: bad investment.
Searcher Shepherd: Search technology uses computational methods to apply a growing ontology based on a
Searcher Shepherd: vector space comparison.
Searcher Shepherd: i see a hand raised? is that a question?
Searcher Shepherd: Guess not and no worries.
Searcher Shepherd: Here is a brief look at what drives the technology.
Searcher Shepherd: I love the Hilltopo Algorithm and am delighted that technology has finally advanced to a
Searcher Shepherd: point where it can come a reality instead of a theory. It was developed by two computer
Searcher Shepherd: scientists at University of Toronto. Jon Kleinbert at Cornell has a similar theory with his
Searcher Shepherd: Hypertext Induced Topic Selection
Searcher Shepherd: Both of these are performed on a small subset of the corpus that best represents nature
Searcher Shepherd: of the whole Web.
Searcher Shepherd: Results are ranked according to the number of non-affiliated “experts” point to it – i.e. not
Searcher Shepherd: in the same site or directory Affiliation is transitive [if A=B and B=C then A=C]
Searcher Shepherd: A non-affiliated expert is a page that is not in the same domain or related domain.
Searcher Shepherd: From all of this Authority sites are derived with HUBs being pages that contain navigation
Searcher Shepherd: links to authorities on a particualr subject.
Searcher Shepherd: A beauty of Hilltop is that unlike PageRank, it is query-specific and reinforces the
Searcher Shepherd: relationship between the authority and the user’s query. You don’t have to be big or have
Searcher Shepherd: a thousand links from auto parts sites to be an “authority."
Searcher Shepherd: Once designated as an authority, links from these pages are afforded more weight.
Searcher Shepherd: Google’s Florida update is rumored to be an extensive deployment of Hilltop and saw a
Searcher Shepherd: lot of sites that had developed links from extraneous sites fall far in the results sets.
Searcher Shepherd: Hilltop is a solid step forward in the direction of "relationship"; the relationship between
Searcher Shepherd: pages that link to one another.
Searcher Shepherd: Those list-o-link pages are just taking up space on the Web now.
Searcher Shepherd: Topic Sensitive PageRank takes the PageRank vectors and combines them with a topic-
Searcher Shepherd: based Web. IT measures importance within the confine of a particular topic. Semantics
Searcher Shepherd: influencing PageRank.
Searcher Shepherd: So, the good news is that the technology is coming around to a classification schema for
Searcher Shepherd: Web content and search results ranking. The not-so-good news is that we, as information
Searcher Shepherd: architects/interaction designers/experience designers and the like have the expertise in
Searcher Shepherd: human behavior torward information and information spaces and are nowhere to be
Searcher Shepherd: found in these developments.
Searcher Shepherd: I love America. Inventors must fully explain their inventions in order to get a patent and
Searcher Shepherd: lock up ownership. The United States Patent Office is a great resource on where search
Searcher Shepherd: technology is going.
Searcher Shepherd: There is an thesaurus-like search engine that has combined its index with human
Searcher Shepherd: mediated catagories. A query is matched to the catagories.
Searcher Shepherd: One search company wants to take the trouble out of selecting a search engine by
Searcher Shepherd: brokering queries and directing them to the engine with the best results.
Searcher Shepherd: Both MSN and Google are working on behavior search applications. These desktop apps
Searcher Shepherd: collect information on how the client segments information on the hard drive, what they
Searcher Shepherd: search for, what they click on, how long they stay on a page, what they have in their
Searcher Shepherd: bookmarks, how those bookmarks are arranged, how they iterate their searches, etc.
Searcher Shepherd: This information is then synthesized and used to sort results.
Searcher Shepherd: My favorite, predictive search where the system notes the user’s behavior with search,
Searcher Shepherd: results, time on page, etc and then produces content that would seem to be the next
Searcher Shepherd: logical choice were it present on the page.
Searcher Shepherd: All of these focus on the tool, few focus on the client. This is where we com in.
Searcher Shepherd: There are a lot of options available to IA with regard to the development of search
Searcher Shepherd: technology
Searcher Shepherd: We can continue to be disengaged entirely.
Searcher Shepherd: We can cooperate by developing best practices based on our knowledge of user needs
Searcher Shepherd: and our abilities to structure information spaces
Searcher Shepherd: We can initiate changes in the direction of serach technology to facilitate understanding
Searcher Shepherd: of spatial relationships through the modeling of information
Searcher Shepherd: I cannot emphasize enough how much I learned from the McCollough book.
Searcher Shepherd: His thoughts on translating building architect theories on space influcing perception to
Searcher Shepherd: information architecture are terrific
Searcher Shepherd: back to the script
Searcher Shepherd: Navigation blindness – don’t make me think, just show me to the search box. Considering
Searcher Shepherd: the sometimes hundreds of sites folks visit in a given session, it is understandable that
Searcher Shepherd: they get tired of figuring out the navigation schemas for each one. Especially when it is so
Searcher Shepherd: easy to go to the search box or pogo back to the search results.
Searcher Shepherd: Navigation fatigue – every site is different and sometimes that gets tiring.
Searcher Shepherd: Page paradigm – Mark Hurst gave us the Page Paradigm and the observation that the
Searcher Shepherd: locus of attention for the user is at the center of the page. The navigation that we so
Searcher Shepherd: painstakingly develop is confined to the periphery.
Searcher Shepherd: Transitional volatility – This comes from David Danielson's master's thesis at Stanford.
Searcher Shepherd: The key takeaway from this stellar research for the purposes of this "talk" is that subtle
Searcher Shepherd: changes in the navigation, i.e. transition to a navigation that is contextual to the directory
Searcher Shepherd: or area, nudged the client to notice it and use it.
Searcher Shepherd: A visionary site manager at TechNet, Pam Salle, used it in 2005 to great success in the
Searcher Shepherd: desktop deployment section. Client use of navigation and satisfaction went way up.
Searcher Shepherd: I am not suggesting here that we do away with the traditional tools that we've been using
Searcher Shepherd: so far. many of them have and will continue to withstand the test of time.
Searcher Shepherd: I am suggesting that "findability" is not almost fully in the hands of search technology and
Searcher Shepherd: that we need to acknowledge that to ourselves
Searcher Shepherd: so that we can bring the locus of attention back to the client and the information need and
Searcher Shepherd: the information that will service that need
Searcher Shepherd: and away from the speed of processing and the complex math required to build predictive
Searcher Shepherd: engines that might understand