Attendees of the 12th annual World Wide Web conference in Budapest were the first to hear of dozens of new innovations and technologies that could change the way we relate to computers and information in the future. The conference is one of the intellectual highlight events in the world of computers and is often seen as the place to premier new ideas and concepts. Showing increasing confidence in the world of search engines, this year’s conference featured several search related ideas and innovations including a method for speeding up Google from Stanford University, ways to personalize Google search results, and a new form of product-focused search relying on peer and user reviews.

Perhaps the most interesting paper presented at the conference focused on ways to improve Google’s speed by up to 30%. (read more) This is important, as the greatest barrier to truly personalized search results is the working speed of most search engines. Even though Google currently produces lighting fast results for users, searches based on personal information will require a great deal more processing power from search engine servers which will need to store and remember information from searches previously conducted by the individual user. The techniques are based on a branch of mathematics called numerical linear algebra. According to Stanford University researchers, Google could increase the speed at which it returns results by clustering results from similar based searches and remembering the directions page-links go from the initial documents. After performing statistical analysis on “clusters” of results, Google would be able to accurately predict the needs of different types of users and generate results up to 1/3 faster.

If Google does adopt technologies to speed up the production of results for search engine users, the era of personalized searches may be upon us. The creation of personalized search results has been a goal for search engineers for the past 2 years. By collecting data on the types of searches conducted by individual users, search engines will be able to accurately predict which information is most relevant to which users, thus delivering the best possible search results in the lowest amount of time. The bottom line is that search engine users constantly complain that results, while close to being relevant to their needs are always shifting, thus producing uncertainty when looking for information.

A third interesting concept involves using personal reviews of products to produce search engine rankings based on actual user experiences. In a paper titled, “Mining the Peanut Gallery” introduced by NEC Labs researchers, the idea of using personalized reviews of products is not really new but their methods of weighing user input and the highly subjective nature of personal reviews are. In the disparaging words of one conference attendee, “Humans can be so… random”. By taking the randomness of human product interaction into account, the authors believe they can accurately produce search results based on the highest number of positive reviews. On an interesting note, two of the papers’ authors now work as search engineers at Google and Overture.

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QUESTION
When you make optimized pages for a company, lets say the company is called www.<not-shown>.com and the key words are: "astronomy"; "constellations"; "zodiac"; and so on. If the first page is called index and optimized with the key word "astronomy", what would you call the other pages for the other key words so the search engine will look at them.

I'm having a tough time for the other pages to be found by search engines even after I submitted them to the search engine. Is it because they are only looking at "Index.htm" pages? - Help, Rich

ANSWER
The problem seems to be that the search engines are not readily indexing the internal pages of your web site. The quickest fix would be to add a textual menu at the bottom of every page in your site. Each link should include text which properly reflects the content on each page. Graphical menus are index-able but when there are no alt tags or keywords in a link the search engines will have to rely solely on the content in each destination page to determine placements. The idea is to make it easy for them by not only properly optimizing the destination page but also the links leading to it.

As for your page structure, I find it best to create file names which also reflect the content of the page. So for example, a page with zodiac charts would actually be named zodiac-charts.html. If you wanted to you could even double up on this tactic by creating a sub-directory for each service or product that you have to offer. For example any products related to astronomy could be found in www.yoursite.com/astronomy/. This is an option, though, which requires some restraint since it is very simple to get carried away by creating too many sub-directories. Just keep in mind the general lesson; that keywords in a URL can be an effective addition to any search engine campaign. IF they are relevant to the destination page. Just look at the exaggerated URL structure at the Open Directory Project for a good example - http://www.dmoz.org/Shopping/Recreation/Science_and_Nature/Astronomy/