The Power of Search - September Digital Doughnut Meetup
How do you use search most effectively? Slideshare for your to-do list and Start-up technology by Flubit.
The September Digital Doughnut Meetup was on The Power of Search which could’ve been called the twin powers of search. With the speakers taking up different positions, it was optimised from both ends. Zigfrids at Hoxton Square hosted the energetic group who turned up to listen to the current state of search, how not be searched, and how to get the most out of organic search. Graham Ruddick opened the night asking how many people in the room worked in SEO – 20%, Digital Marketing – 60%, and General – 20%.
The two opposing views on how to use search can be summed up as; to the best of your ability, or to avoid being seen by it at all. Ideally you use both approaches well and use them intelligently.
The first speaker Emily Hill, CEO of Write My Site, gave us a rundown on the history of search including Black Hat SEO and why Google introduced Panda (looking for quality content), Penguin (snapping off link baiting), and Hummingbird (heralding the age of semantic search). Her slideshare explained “Google is trying to become more sophisticated. It wants to go beyond the words and phrases people use, to figure out what they mean.” As long as people know what they mean, do Google and I think alike about my keywords and search terms? Semantic (relating to meaning in language) search is based on 1. Predictive search, 2. Voice search, 3. Image search.
For predictive search Emily introduced us to ConceptNet5, a way computers can use a semantic network to help understand text written by people, “It is built from nodes representing concepts, in the form of words or short phrases of natural language, and labelled relationships between them”. As you do, I search my name Samantha and the first result is ‘related to Carrie in Sex and City’. To be fair this is one of the shows I use to remind people of my name now that Bewitched draws too many blank stares.