Posts

Caveat googlers?

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Courtesy of article from  getlisted.org , circa 2010 Google has enjoyed mainstream use  as a verb , in English and Japanese ("ググる"). Furthermore, if Wikipedia is to be believed, people "google" things in Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. However, a quick look at any of Google's portals shows that the company offers much, much more. Combining its various services with the perceived bias for presenting content with close allegations has led to my finding a recent article by Danny Sullivan . There he, in a nutshell, decries his company's having crossed an arbitrary line of what search engines are "expected" to do - objectively point to online content - and what it now (and increasingly) does: provide a biased subset of content that aligns with its business model. I'd found Mr. Sullivan's op/ed via an article posted to TechCrunch , which caught my eye due to its title: "Why we may no longer be able to trust Go

Google+ers, please circle my "Mayo T Plus" page!

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I use the macro feature liberally to create wallpaper-friendly photos Also known in more colloquial (and honest) parlance as a "shameless plug", I would greatly appreciate if everyone using Google+ who has enjoyed my nature photographs, rants about language, or who may have an interest in my views on Japanese culture, to add my new Google+ hosted "business" page  to their circles. Why, you may ask, should you do so? Well, several reasons come to mind. First, I have decided to begin populating this page, rather than use my personal G+ presence, to promote my "best of" photographs. Local foods and blurry candids may still be published to my Facebook timeline (as well as to pre-existing themed albums such as my pandas only album), but I believe that some of my pictures are actually good enough to use as desktop or mobile device wallpaper: hence the justification of this migration. Second, I have in past done some fast and loose freelance translation

ICANN't bring myself to buy a domain name (yet)

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Godaddy.com seems to have plenty of detractors With apologies for the unintentional hiatus I've returned to ramble, hopefully not too incoherently, about a topic to which I've given brief bursts of intensive thought over many years: domain names. For my day to day job, I consider things like how valuable the gTLD s (generic top level domain - such as .net, .info, .org, and the ccTLD values - ISO compliant two letter country codes) happen to be for my clients' web sites. Of course, since they've relaxed the rules on new gTLDs (at a price of $185K USD a pop, much to many people's chagrin, as ranted about by asmartbear - and his commenters - from a year ago), there will be even more to consider for future site analyses. In the context of maintaining (if intermittently) this blog, I'd read many articles and posts encouraging everyone to purchase their own domain, as the *.blogspot.com address "seems unprofessional" and could adversely affec

Thoughts on Google's Knowledge Graph

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Disambiguating "Taj Mahal" - structure or music band? Courtesy of Google's own blog Otherwise known as semantic web, Google has announced its roll-out of ways to prompt the user to help disambiguate query terms ("strings", as in sequences of textual characters) to more specific concepts ("things"). Very catchy slogan. The Mashable article provides a basic overview of what this news means, and as I read this, my thoughts invariably turned to my former job in LanguageWare (which has been partially described over four non-contiguous blog posts last year, related to Language Identification ). When one is first exposed to linguistic data which has been amassed for the purpose of spell-check, it becomes quickly clear that in order to use this same word lists effect grammatical checks and even orthographical ones (e.g. whether a proper noun needs to be title-cased even when it doesn't commence a sentence), the part of speech is important. The afor

A tale of Wikipedia's dominance

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As illustrated in the xkcd comic above, Wikipedia has had an enormous impact on many web users. A contributing factor to their success in the more recent years, may be attributable to how visible their pages are in organic searches. Google has been long reputed to favour Wikipedia content in their SERPs. However, recently Search Engine Watch established that (albeit by a narrow margin), Bing is even more likely  than Google to return a Wikipedia page organically. Personally, I find it completely unsurprising that Wikipedia articles would dominate organic rankings: Their URLs are easy to hack: I often go directly to the topic I wish by crafting the URL, and they also have extensive redirects in place, allowing me to reach the desired content even if my guess wasn't the canonical term. They make an effort to police their content to minimize bias and conjecture. Many of its pages are updated frequently, again with the power of crowd-sourcing. The writing quality is also mon