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.

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.

While thousands kiss in the Philippines on the day before Valentine’s Day, I realize I am still working on this blog. Actually here in Brazil there is no Valentine’s Day tomorrow. For some reason, which I haven’t figured out yet, Valentine’s Day in Brazil is in June and not in February. My wife likes it though. Since I am Dutch and live in Brazil, she gets 2 Valentine’s Days a year.

This Sunday I hope to finish the complete blog so that we can start telling people about it. I write these posts in my column for testing purposes. I figured that if I have to write test posts, I can just as well make them interesting, even if it is just to my wife and I.

So this will be a short post, but it serves its purpose. Happy Valentine’s Day to Everyone!

Honestly, I wasn’t asked to be a columnist in experts.knowledge-finder.com. I just have this column because, together with Aaron, I run this blog. We started knowledge-finder.com a year and 3 months ago, and it has grown to become a well known article website where many writers now submit their articles to. Last year we added a paid directory and this directory is gaining popularity as well. We are really happy with how the site is developing and we decided to add this blog at experts.knowledge-finder.com because we wanted to give many of our valued writers the possibility to get more in touch with their audience.

The many long hours I personally put into this website were worth every second of them. We are receiving 50 to 100 articles per month now and many writers keep coming back to us to submit their latest work. It is most definitely a pleasure to see the popularity of the website growing and the many visitors we get also show that knowledge-finder.com is becoming a great resource. And now with this Blog we hope it will become a bit more interactive.

In my personal column I will be writing just about everything. Those who know me from SEO forums, know I generally have strong opinions that not always follow the general public opinion. My column will be strongly opinionated, but that’s what makes it fun I guess!

I am looking forward to seeing how experts.knowledge-finder.com will develop. We invite you to contact us if you would like to be a columnist as well. We´re looking for specific category writers and general columnists.

Cheers,

Peter