Posts filed under 'Online Industry'
July 3rd, 2009
The other day I passed my six year anniversary of working for Yahoo! in Australia. During that time I have worked as a mobile engineer, a media engineer, a media engineering manager, and now as the technical director. I’ve experienced a huge amount of progress during my time so far here, and ever new day is a new and interesting challenge in this thing called the World Wide Web.
Being an anniversary of sorts, I was inspired me to look back as to how the company and indeed the internet has evolved during the past six years. Our Frontpage looked like this six years ago…
These days, the creativity and beauty of what we find is somewhat advanced…
Beauty can be considered only skin deep, but the amount of content, personalisation and creativity that goes behind the presentation layer really sets the user-experience apart from the internet as it was those years ago. Web Search is so far advanced into delivering me answers (even when I’m not sure what questions I’m asking), communication has advanced beyond plain text emails into social networking, and pages don’t just show me flat content, they update themselves as I interact with them: more like an interactive application than a printed page. If I have an opinion on information I find, I can share my thoughts on the subject and see what others might have to say.
More and more, the internet is about allowing me to access the kind of information I want, when I want it, and it makes me wonder what more can change to my data more accessible and easier to consume. When it comes to having a ymax chip inside our heads with a head-up-display inside our retinas, I’ll probably be an early adopter, but I do have a couple of opinions in how the internet could be speeding up progress in the shorter term (comments welcomed btw).
- Pages should be fast! These days I expect instant response from interaction I engage in. It is so last century to click on something and put the kettle on before I get a response. Tools like YSlow, building pages with speed in mind, and generally simple rules like using CDNs, limiting HTTP requests per page and optimising the hell out of the delivery of pages are not just desirable, they are a must!
- Content should (where financially possible) be open. What I mean by this is that although there are some big internet companies out there with some pretty clever people working for them, this pales into insignificance compared with what the millions of developers worldwide can create using open APIs and open data that the large companies can provide. If a company opens its APIs, it gets feedback and innovation in what can happen with that content online. The internet is far better off for these innovations, and it inspires the big internet companies to improve.
So whilst people’s computers increase in performance and (wow, even Telstra in Australia) home/business internet access improves, in my mind the one thing that the internet can really improve on is global innovation through technology that companies like Yahoo! are sharing. Try the Performance, Yahoo! User Interface library and Yahoo! Query Language for ways that performance, user experience and innovation through data can be achieved.
The internet is never going to stand still; neither should the innovation that fuels it.
Wilf
Yahoo!7 Technical Director
Tags: Neil Wilkinson, Yahoo!, Yahoo!7, YQL, YUI
July 2nd, 2009
Neil (Wilf) Wilkinson, our head tech guy will be part of an event at Macquarie Uni in Sydney later this month alongside folks from Google and QUT.
Wilf will be giving the Uni students, researchers and academics an intro to Yahoo!’s Open strategy, with focus on YQL (Yahoo! Query Language). He’ll also give an overview of YQL and will do demonstrations of building mashup’s on the spot.
No pressure Wilf!
More info on the day is below.
Macquarie University, 27-28 July
http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/workshops/mashups09
HCSNet, the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science, is sponsoring a hands-on workshop on building mashups at Macquarie University on the 27th and 28th of July. This is a practical workshop with extensive tutorials on how to use the interfaces to the Google and Yahoo! Mashup services. Participants will gain first-hand knowledge on how to build mashup’s and put this to immediate use.
This is a unique opportunity to learn how to build high impact web applications at low cost. Contact Diego Molla (Email: diego.molla-aliod@mq.edu.au; Tel: 02 9850 9531) or visit http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/workshops/mashups09.
Amanda Millar
Communications Manager, Yahoo!7
Tags: Neil Wilkinson, YQL
May 27th, 2009
Senior Executive Officer? Synthetic Engine Oil? Synchronous Equatorial Orbiter? [singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=right]
Yes, it can mean all those things but I’m only going to talk about Search Engine Optimisation here, because that’s what I do at Yahoo!7.
By definition, SEO is the art and science of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a web site from the ‘organic’ results of search engines. This is achieved by ensuring the content and code is ‘search friendly’ and the pages are effectively linked.
The ‘organic’ results (also referred to as ‘algorithmic’ or ‘natural’ results) are those that a search engine displays and orders based on their proprietary relevance algorithm, rather than the auction-style paid ads which are ranked depending on how much the advertiser bids per click (plus other factors).
Simply put, if you want more people to visit your web site you HAVE to think of search engines as your most valuable visitors – and if you’re not, you can be sure your competitors will be, if they’re not already.
I’d hope you don’t need much more convincing, but just in case:
You may even have found this page via a search engine, but have you ever wondered exactly how the results are ordered in the way they are? This question obsesses all search engine optimisers and much as I’d love to give you a simple answer, there really isn’t one. Let me give you a brief history of web search to put this into context.
Back in the pre-Cambrian era of the internet (the early 90′s) search engines had only a few million documents in their indexes and it wasn’t very challenging to spoof your way to a high ranking for almost any keyword phrase with a little effort. As the World Wide Web became available to ‘normal’ people (well, mostly) and broke free from the educational, research and scientific community, the number of pages on the internet grew exponentially – driven by commerce and increased access to connected personal computers. No longer could relevance based on meta data assigned by the author (such as the meta keywords tag) be trusted, making it difficult for search algorithms to sort the spam from genuine content. At this time you were more likely to find better results using a human edited web directory (such as the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ, the Open Directory Project). Web search technology was struggling to cope with the deluge of new data and high proportion of low value content.
Clearly, it wasn’t feasible to solve this problem using humans to classify every page so the ever-growing processing power of computers, coupled with the availability of increased bandwidth, was applied by some of our era’s brightest brains to reverse the decline in search result quality. As ways to monetise search were proven, investment increased. Algorithms became much more complex and ‘off-page’ factors (for example recognising the relative importance of links from other pages, where your site is hosted and calculations of how relevant inbound links are) made spamming the search index much less successful.
Let’s jump back to the present. Modern search engines now assess hundreds of individual factors to determine what a document is about and where it should be rated against others for a given query. I use the term ‘document’ because PDFs, Word documents, video files and other bodies of information can appear in a search result, not just HTML pages. It’s a significant challenge to spoof your way in and the penalties of getting caught doing so are costly. Of course, the cat and mouse game played by spammers will probably run for a long time, but it pays to play by the rules (for example, you should understand the Yahoo! webmaster guidelines).
With so many moving parts it’s impossible to reverse-engineer search algorithms to find the perfect recipe for success; the constant flux of competing sites, search engine servers that update at different times, the personalisation of results based on previous activity and your geographic location are just some of the factors that obfuscate the underlying process. This is why using an experienced SEO (search engine optimiser) or search marketing agency to help increase your search traffic can be the best investment you’ll make.
Over time I’ll write more about how to get started with your optimisation process and will include some useful tips, tricks and tools. If you have any specific questions or would like me to cover particular topics please let me know by leaving a comment.
If you have any questions leave a comment!
Aidan Beanland
Regional SEO Manager
Tags: Aidan Beanland, SEO
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