In www.knowledge-finder.com we have many categories and they´re not all serious or business oriented. We also have categories like famous celebrities. But in this category we don’t get many article submissions.

Unfortunately I have to say, because we would love to have people submit articles about their favorite celebrities. So this post is just a request for people to submit articles about their favorite celebrities. Write what you like and you may even link to your favorite celebrity websites.

The story goes that after one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s performances, several people were offering him their congratulations, when one woman commented, “I wish God had bestowed me with such genius.” “It isn’t genius, madam, nor is it magic.” Beethoven replied. “All you have to do is practice on your piano eight hours a day for 40 years.” Quote from Nan Russell’s article.

Nancy writes about the “plug and play” society and how people want results immediately and are often not willing to wait for the rewards of hard work. This can be a disaster in business which we at Knowledge-finder.com can relate to on a personal level. We have had to wait for better results in the search engines. Luckily we are not part of the instant gratification club so we will do fine.

How about you? Are you willing to take the time to allow results to become reality or do you want instant gratification.

Read: It Takes Time - by Nan Russell.

Distance to the Sun: 150.000.000 Km / 93.200.000 Miles (which is about 8 light-minutes)
Distance to the nearest Star: 4 light-years
Distance to the center of the galaxy: 30.000 light-years (give or take a couple of thousand light-years)

Distance to your work: ?
Time to get to work: ?

If those galactic distances seem not so big to you, you´re used to traffic jams, every morning and every evening. What can you do to avoid those nasty traffic jams. There are options, though it depends on your job what is possible.

If timing is flexible, you could decide to start working only at 10:30 am in stead of 8:30 am. That saves you at least an hour in traffic. More time at home in the morning!!! You have to work later too of course, but advantage,. you won’t be home that much later anyway, since you avoid the evening traffic jam.

What else is possible?

In an article about impression spam on the clickznews network, impression spam is being discussed as a way to reduce the rankings of your competitors in order to free up space in your own rankings. We are of course talking about PPC advertising and then specifically the Google Adwords system.

Google Adwords uses Click Thru Rate (CTR) as part of its ranking algorithm for the ads. A company can make an ad of a competitor appear lots of times to artificially increase the number of impressions of a competitor. As a result the CTR goes down and with that the positions on the page. This is called impression spam.

What ways are available to combat impression spam? Some other factors that are likely to be part of the ranking algorithm as well can be influenced. Here is a possibility:

Separate keywords hit and move to a separate campaign. This allows you to create a new campaign for the keywords hit, in order to start fresh with the same keyword phrases. This should speed up getting back in the previously targeted positions.

For these limited number of keywords in a single campaign you can temporarily increase the daily budget to an extreme level. This may force the position to go up as more clicks are required to reach the daily budget. Though this doesn’t get you actually more clicks, the algorithm may try anyway by increasing the position of the ads.

Also try using brackets, quotes and if the problem is focused on these then try not using them. Sometimes de-optimizing your campaign may have very good results on the results, even with lower CTR’s. A high CTR can cause less impressions or lower positions because of your daily budget being too low.

Last December Google announced it wants to make offline information searchable online. They want to do this by scanning books and other documents from libraries. It made me wonder how you can scan that many pages. Is this a process that is done by hand (turning the pages)?

So I searched for document scanning and found Digital Documents LLC that does document scanning services. One of the things mentioned in this website is character recognition. Not only do you want to scan a page with text, but you want to actually recognize the letters so you can reproduce it. For Google this is very important.

Google wants to make the offline information searchable and therefore has to litterally read and index all the texts in the books. Without character recognition this is not possible. They’re up for a big task, but I am sure they will be successful. They already have most of the leading libraries on board.

How many people do you know who write about things like “The Typology of Stalkers”? Sam Vaknin not only writes about the mind of the stalker, he is the author of “Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited”.

Ever wonder what types of personalities stalkers have?

According to Sam there are four different types of stalker personalities.

Read more here: Typology of Stalkers or if you enjoy his writing do an article search for “Sam Vaknin” here and read some more great articles by this brilliant man.

Search engines are great tools for research. Lets find the love hate score for the 10 actors/singers and 10 actresses/singers. How do we do this? Simply search (in Google) for how many results are found for a the 2 phrases "I love actor name" and "I hate actor name". Here are the results:

The same for the actresses:

So what does this tell us? I think most actors and actresses are more interested in the absolute numbers than in the Love Hate Index it self. In the end, the more they say about you, the more money you make!!!

Humor is one of the best ways to relativate serious matters. David Leonhardt is the happy guy and a regular writer for knowledge-finder.com. He knows how to twist things in a humorous way and actually makes you think about things in a different way. One of his articles titled A 30% chance that statistics never lie, is probably one of his most beautiful articles. I most certainly do think so. The following statistics taken from his article are shocking, but you won’t understand why unless you read the full article:

“If current trends continue, by 2017 every child born will be illiterate.”

Sa-ay. That is good news. And Uncle Gyula was right. In fact, cancer rates in cemeteries remain at historic lows. And statistics never lie.”

If you love statistics, this article is going to make you love them even more.

Even web sites need coaches. Philippa Gamse caught my eye when she submitted an article to knowledge-finder.com titled “How Does Your Website Make Me Feel?” Having built a few sites including this EKF Blog with my partner Peter Faber, we understand how important a welcoming web site is to keep peoples attention. If a business doesn’t have some sort of appeal and flavor folks will just not get it and leave.

I read this morning in a forum that the average time people spend on a web site before deciding to stay or go is only 13 seconds or less! In other words, you have only 13 seconds or less to make your guest feel welcome!

Philippa Gamse is a web site strategy consultant and professional speaker. She helps small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations create powerful, differentiated and emotionally intelligent Websites.

Language is probably the only thing that needs it self to be explainable. In other words, you need to use language to explain language. And that is exactly why it is so difficult to have a computer understand language.

But we really would like a computer to be able to understand language. Especially a search engine would benefit if it could understand what we mean with what we type in that little search box.

With current search engines you need to know what you are searching for before you can actually find it. A search query like: “How to clean my kitchen” won’t answer that question, it will merely show you web pages that are about cleaning kitchens. You will most likely find pages that sell cleaning products for in the kitchen.

However, if a human were to select the pages based on the query “How to clean my kitchen”, (s)he would not select cleaning product pages, but informative pages. Why can’t a search engine understand the difference?

The main reason is that a search engine is more a data retrieval and ranking system than an information retrieval and ranking system.

Most search engines ignore “common” words like: how, to, the, a, in, for, etc. Though these words may seem insignificant, they are actually one of the most important words in language. Probably only verbs, and especially all their forms, are more important.

The example “how to clean my kitchen” is an excellent example. A search engine ignores “how” and “to” and basically searches the index based on “clean” and “kitchen”. But “clean kitchen” is not the same as “how to clean my kitchen”. By ignoring “how to” an essential part of the information in the search query is lost.

But how to make a machine know which pages are most related when dealing with a “how to” question? If you look at how the human brain does it, you quickly realize that it cheats. The human brain has a huge database of memories and experience, and all it does is compare the question with the information in the database.

Ask a baby how to clean the kitchen and it won’t even know that you’re talking to it because it hasn’t learned language yet. A 10 year old will know what you want, but lacks experience. A search engine is like a baby that has learned how to walk and recognize words, but has yet to “understand” what a searcher really wants.

The next big step in search engine technology will be the ability to understand language, and most likely it will be a slow learning process. It would not surprise me if this process will take 20 years, about the same time a baby needs to grow up.