Google improves its Arabic Search engine, but does it work?

Google improves its Arabic Search engine, but does it work?
A recent post by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, two engineers at Google search quality group, captured my attention. The post discusses recent improvements to Google Arabic search engine. The improvements involve searches where users repeat the same letter or forget to add spaces between words. “Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with [...]

Caffeine Ready to be Launched in New Year

Caffeine Ready to be Launched in New Year
It’s been in testing since last summer, but now Google is getting ready to release their much talked about Caffeine – which is said to be an entirely new way to index the internet. Though Google won’t say exactly when Caffeine will be released, Google’s search quality specialist Matt Cutts …

Microsoft Yahoo Deal Makes SES San Jose 2009 Must-Attend Event

Microsoft Yahoo Deal Makes SES San Jose 2009 Must-Attend Event

So, I’m sure you’ve already about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. If you haven’t, check out the news stories and blog posts below:

It’s Official: Microsoft and Yahoo! Finally Strike Search Deal

It’s official: Microsoft-Yahoo ink 10-year search pact

Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal: The Most Important Facts (And Some Opinion)

But if you want to figure out what MicroHoo means for your search engine marketing campaign, including your search engine optimization and pay per click advertising programs, then Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2009 is a must-attend event. It was already the right place to be and August 10-14 was already the right time to be there. But now it is the hottest ticket in town.

For example, you might want to attend the session entitled, “Don’t Call it a Comeback: Semantic Technology and Search.” Among the speakers who will be there for Q&A are: Othar Hansson, Software Engineer, Google, Kevin Haas, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo!, Mark Johnson, Program Manager, Bing, and Dr. Tomasz Imielinski, EVP, Global Search & Answers, Ask.com. I imagine they are all busy preparing for the event.

Or, there’s the session entitled, “SEO Tools of the Trade: What’s in YOUR Toolbox?” Among the speakers are Rajesh Srivastava, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing, and David Roth, Director of Search Marketing, Yahoo!, Inc. Will they play nicely and share the same advice?

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Keeping it Local: The Convergence of Phones & Local Search.” Among the speakers are Josh Siegel, Product Manager, Mobile Local Search, Google, and Justin Jed, Group Product Manager, Bing Mobile. Will we see the SES version of PubCon’s Search Engine Smackdown?

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations.” Among the speakers are Marc Canabou, Senior Director, Product Management Leader, Yahoo! Search Advertising, and Ari Levenfeld, Manager Client Services, Ask Sponsored Listings. Do you think they are updating their presentation as you are reading this?

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Credit Crunch: The Death of Last Click Attribution and its Impact on Paid Search Advertising.” Among the speakers is Mark Grote, Sr. Search Advertising Manager , Microsoft. Do you think you should be taking notes?

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues.” Among the speakers are Greg Grothaus, Search Quality Team, Google, Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Ivan Davtchev, Lead Product Manager, Search Relevance, Yahoo! Search. The moderator may need to keep this from turning into a tag-team wrestling event.

Or, there’s the sponsored session entitled, “Bing Toolbox: Your One-Stop Shop for Better ROI.” The speakers are Rajesh Srivastava, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing, and Alessandro Catorcini, Senior Program Manager, Bing. This has just become a must-attend session.

Or, there’s the afternoon keynote by Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director, AdWords, Google. I wouldn’t skip this one, if I were you.

Or, there’s the session entitled, “The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns.” Among the speakers is Mark McMaster, Senior Planner of B2B and Technology Markets, Google. This was a must-attend session already, but now you will really need to run, not walk, to get a good seat.

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Real World Multivariate Testing.” Among the speakers is Trevor Claiborne, Product Marketing Manager, Google. What new messages will he be testing at this event?

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Ads in a Quality Score World.” Among the speakers are Tomaso Pozzi, Product Manager, Core Model & Optimization, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Jonathan Alferness, Group Product Manager, Google. I want a ringside seat for this one.

Or, there’s the session entitled, “The New Search ROI: Measuring More than Conversion.” Among the speakers is James Colborn, Director, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft. I know James. I’m sure he’d rather be invited to the White House for a beer with the Google guy, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. So, he may just have to make the best of it at this pivotal time in the industry.

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Images & Search Engines: Getting the Full Picture.” Among the speakers are R.J. Pittman, Director of Product Management, Google, Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Bing, Microsoft Corporation, and Kaushal Kurapati, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search. I want photos taken of this panel discussion.

Or, there’s the session entitled, “In-House SEO: Structuring the Organization for Success.” Among the speakers is Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo! Do you think it’s too soon to ask if Microsoft-Yahoo are structuring their organizations for success?

Or, there’s the session entitled, “Search Becomes the Display OS.” Among the speakers are Rajas Moonka, Group Business Product Manager, Google Inc., and Josh Jacobs, Vice President and General Manager, Advertising Technology, Yahoo! Inc. Oh, boy, this is going to be great.

Now, the last time that “Microsoft-Yahoo deal” was a search term was back in February 2008. Microsoft Corp. had just announced that it had made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion.

Since it was an unsolicited bid, nobody wanted to talk about MicroHoo when they turned up at SES London 2008 two weeks later.

But, this time the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is a done deal. So, I’m betting that everyone wants to talk about what MicroHoo means for the search engine marketing industry.

And since I was already planning to be at SES San Jose 2009, now I’m going to have to scramble to get seats in the front row.

Google Discusses Search Evaluation Process

Google Discusses Search Evaluation Process

Google had been doing a series of posts about search quality. Today, the latest post in the series discusses how evaluation enters into the the process.

Scott Huffman, Engineering Director, gave four insights into the nuances of difficulty experienced in search evaluation:

• First, understanding what a user really wants when they type a query — the query’s “intent” — can be very difficult. For highly navigational queries like [ebay] or [orbitz], we can guess that most users want to navigate to the respective sites. But how about [olympics]? Does the user want news, medal counts from the recent Beijing games, the IOC’s homepage, historical information about the games, … ? This same exact question, of course, is faced by our ranking and search UI teams. Evaluation is the other side of that coin.
• Second, comparing the quality of search engines (whether Google versus our competitors, Google versus Google a month ago) is never black and white. It’s essentially impossible to make a change that is 100% positive in all situations; with any algorithmic change you make to search, many searches will get better and some will get worse.
• Third, there are several dimensions to “good” results. Traditional search evaluation has focused on the relevance of the results, and of course that is our highest priority as well. But today’s search-engine users expect more than just relevance. Are the results fresh and timely? Are they from authoritative sources? Are they comprehensive? Are they free of spam? Are their titles and snippets descriptive enough? Do they include additional UI elements a user might find helpful for the query (maps, images, query suggestions, etc.)? Our evaluations attempt to cover each of these dimensions where appropriate.
• Fourth, evaluating Google search quality requires covering an enormous breadth. We cover over a hundred locales (country/language pairs) with in-depth evaluation. Beyond locales, we support search quality teams working on many different kinds of queries and features. For example, we explicitly measure the quality of Google’s spelling suggestions, universal search results, image and video searches, related query suggestions, stock oneboxes, and many, many more.

Not sure if I’m buying that Olympics example. Google didn’t do a great job with the Beijing Olympics, and surely their algorithm could handle serving up more relevant search results during the time surrounding the event.

I’m not saying that search query intent evaluation is easy, just that the Olympics query is not quite as problematic as Google is making it out to be.

The rest of the points are things we’ve been hearing from Google for a long time. We know they’re progressing on universal and personalization search efforts, all in their famous intent to create the best user experience.

So, what methods does Google employ to address these evaluations? Huffman offered up the following:

• Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.
• Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.

What do you think of Google’s search evaluation? What evaluations would you like to see them conduct? Discuss in the comments.

An Introduction to Google Search Quality

Posted by Udi Manber, Google VP Engineering, Search Quality

Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. Our job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which Read more