An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Much speculation abounds when it comes to reverse engineering which criteria are prioritized in search engine ranking algorithms. In the SEOmoz ranking factors summary  from this year, the correlation of higher page ranks to greater Facebook "like" numbers was noted. As my team lead (co-author of Audience, Relevance and Search - here's its companion blog ) and I discussed, it was clear that there was an implication that people were likely to interpret this correlation as causation - that is, cum hoc ergo propter hoc.  It's a very easy trap to fall into: thinking that we can rely on a quantifiable factor such as SNS-driven endorsement counts to predict how high up a SERP the page would be likely to be found. However, if one examines the use case scenario of a "popular" page, here's what I would easily envision happening: Something that is useful, very entertaining or plain memorable is published. News of its existence begins to virally spread - t

The Ethical Issues of Personalisation Online  asked the following questions, so I thought I'd present my views here: But, is it rea sonable to expect a corporate entity to act for the greater good? Particularly if providing users with a more balanced SERP results in them high-tailing it straight into the warm embrace of the competition? In any case – wasn’t it always this way? Before the internet people consumed news only via whichever media sat comfortably with their own political affiliation. Plus of course, even if a more balanced mix of results are shown, you can’t *make* people click through to read something they don’t want to. So, what do you think? Should we be afraid of personalisation? Should we push for easier ways to turn it off? Should there be more ‘balanced’ results for certain types of queries? Should I get myself a tin foil hat, cancel my broadband, flush my smartphone and hide under my desk?   First, while I would imagine a for-profit organization would consider

The New York Times covered Google+ recently, as did Reuters: their walk-through is worth a look, and has its funny moments too. Thanks to my MIT affiliation, I was one of the early adopter/invitees for this service, so I've had a day now to peruse its UI (by the time this post is published). Due to the aforementioned privilege, I was an early user of other Google services. For instance, I've had a Gmail account since summer of 2004, and it wasn't generally available until early 2007. Which is why I can vividly recall how Buzz and Wave flopped (although NYT lists Orkut as another instance of defeat, I understand it's still quite a popular SNS in Brazil). The Buzz functionality is still extant despite what some of my colleagues seemed to think: my tweets are forwarded to it along with my networkedblogs -driven automated blog post summaries. However, my audience on Buzz is 6, despite my Gmail contact list which exceeds 250. Speaking of SNS, Orkut, Friendster and My

As many of us are wont to do, I periodically perform exact match searches on my full name on various search engines. For neutrality, I use a cache- and cookie-cleared Firefox, and happen to be on OSX. The results I see from Google and Bing today, are surprisingly different. While it doesn't surprise me that Google prioritizes its own sites (of which blogspot is one), the Dogear and Lotus presence are listed in the top SERP, which is a bit surprising, considering how old they are. Bing, on the other hand, doesn't show any of my employer-hosted pages, not just in the top set of results, but anywhere in the 45 listings it provides. Google also claims there are "about 476" hits for my name in double quotes - that's more than ten times the number acknowledged by Bing. Also, due to a combination of its emphasis on Facebook matches and my high security settings, 4 of the Bing hits are of someone eponymous to me, whereas only 2 of Google's points to that same p

In the early days of the world wide web, most links to external sites were, in my opinion, "legitimate" rather than contrived. My first site dated back to 1994, and consisted of a landing page along with some samples of my academic writing. Back then, besides having no Wikipedia (but a plethora of Usenet newsgroups to refer to), I was able to mainly browse and select what I considered to be quality sites to which to link, and I gave no thought to soliciting inbound links from those destinations. Something that I recall about Japanese sites before the turn of the millennium, is that the cultural concept of " giri " was being commonly applied to making links mutual, and more interestingly, that authors of content gave explicit permission to have their content linked to by strangers, with the proper etiquette that when one created an external link, the owner(s) of the destination page would be notified. Now, most SEO blogs and resources speak of the painstaking ro