Monthly Archives: September 2007

Improving Google

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Ha – it’s presumptuous to suggest improvements to huge companies like Google, but that is what the internet, and blogging in particular, is all about.    Master UK SEO  Dave Naylor has got five suggestions over at his blog and several others have chimed in.     I wasn’t sure why  Dave suggested clustering all the WordPress sites, forcing people to get a new domain, but this small inconvenience might be a good form of spam filtering because it prevents spammers from using free WordPress sites.       There’s now a conflict between the desire of search engines to screen out “junk” content and spammers and the desire to rapidly include new content.    It is not as easy as many like to think to even define junk content.    Last year I had a good talk with Brian White of Google’s search quality team about how to “value” content.  I posed a question along these lines:

What if you have two sites that are extremely similar in content and quality.
Both are about pet cats.
Both are of horrible quality with terrible grammer, bad facts, and spelling errors.

Site 1 is from  a spammer to boost rankings for a site selling pet food.
Site 2 is from a 3rd grade student working hard on her school report.

In this case site 1 is spam and site 2 is not, but how does Google tell the difference since they are virtually identical?

His answer was to suggest that the links structure in to these sites is likely to be different, and that through this you could probably determine which was the “real” and which was the “spam” site.

Of course this gets even more interesting when you make site 1 – the “spammy” site – of much higher quality.    In that case you might have a case where 99% of all users would prefer going to the site that is trying to manipulate Google but Google has removed that site and left the lower quality, natural one.

This is a very interesting case because I think search has recently devolved into many such ranking challenges.   Much of the content pouring online now is specifically designed to fool the search engines.

This would be an example of what  I’ve noted before – how linking relationships built the web and now the value of linking seems to be hurting it.

Here were my 5 suggestions to Dave / Google:

* Paid site reviews to identify simple problems or penalties. The subtle confusion Google spawns from ambiguous rules applied to mom and pop sites who have no clue is hurting everybody, including Google.

* Implement “site ID” where all sites showing adsense must have a contact person who is identified publicly. Forward site complaints to this person.

* Have more Google parties but drop the cold hamburgers from Google Dance 2007

* Transparency on publisher revenue share from Adsense

* MORE transparency on guidelines and penalties. Less vague references to “sites built for users not adsense”.

Is that a Neuron firing in your Neocortical Column or are you just happy to see me?

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The first major breakthroughs in AI seem most likely to come from a reverse engineering of our own human brains, leading to the holy grail of AI – a conscious, self aware computer. Alternatively they may come from some form of chip implants where we start to blend our own thought processes with CPU input and output, basically dramatically enhancing our own abilities. Least likely in my opinion will be a totally software programmed thinking computer, though that should follow soon after the first two innovations.

In the same way humans learned the basics of flight by observing the structure of bird wings, nature provides us with a lot of clues and an effective “blueprint” of how to create a thinking machine. In simple terms this blueprint is our neocortex, a vast but very repetitive assemblage of about 500,000 neocortical columns, each consisting of about 60,000 neurons. IMHO there is no reason to think that with some 30,000,000,000 neurons available to interact in quadrillions+ of possible ways we need nothing more to explain human thinking than a copy or simulation of an educated neocortex.

Places like the Brain Mind Institute are working to make this neocortical blueprint more readily readable and working on simulations of the brain on supercomputers. It seems to me that from a technological and a philosophical perspectivce this is the most interesting work happening on earth despite the fact that it’s not garnering much interest or funding. AI work in the 70’s somewhat dramatically failed to exceed expectations, especially as AI portrayals in film became increasingly clever and provocative. This early skepticism about the coming strong AI revolution continues to take a toll on the current state of AI research funding and interest, especially in the computer community where most new engineers are looking to populate the more practical, and more lucrative, job niches.

Big Ben, London, UK

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I was browsing some pix from my 2003 trip to England and France and thought this one was cool. We only spent a *single* day in London but made the best of our 11 hours there by hopping on and off tour busses and tearing around taking hundreds of pictures. Even though we spent about a week in Paris I think I remember more from the London visit partly because Paris was relaxed and London was intense and “goal oriented”. Can’t wait to go back and take more time to relax and visit the British Museum. I think my highlight of London was Westminster Abbey, that magnificent and fantastic bastion of modern English speaking culture and history.


Big Ben, London, UK

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

Here’s more about England Travel 

Singularity Institute

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Given my recent almost obsessive interest in the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution I don’t know how I missed hearing about the recent Singularity Conference in Palo Alto, let alone missed hearing about the Singularity Institute.

Thankfully they’ve recorded all the talks so I’ll participate virtually when those go online.

I’ve been wondering why there has been so little fuss about the implications of a robust AI entity, since it seems fairly obvious to me that it will quickly dwarf our feeble human intellectual capacity and therefore usher in a new and very promising era of efficiency, hindered only by the human tendency to be skeptical of key innovations.   My working assumption based on talking with (mostly highly educated) folks is that AI “detractors” fall into two basic groups – the first is by far the largest and composed of those that are basically ignorant about how technology has affected human development over the past few thousand years.    They simply have not spent much time reflecting on how technology has been the key driver of humanity, especially over the past century as the industrial revolution and globalization have been the dominant forces shaping our economic, political, and societal landscapes.    The second group are those that are more familiar than I with programming and technology, are generally very accepting of how technology is revolutionizing the world, yet remain skeptical of the implications of the coming conscious computing and robust AI revolution.     I’m still puzzling over this but think it may be related to a failure to understand the limitations of human biology and neuroscience.   Even a brilliant computer programmer can be a prisoner to the notion that the human brain and human intellect  somehow remain “outside” of normal mechanistic explanations.  Programmers, especially those with religious leanings, may find it hard to accept the insignificance of our human intellects until the machines are already making this abundantly, and sometimes painfully, obvious.

The good news is that unlike previous sea change technologies a massively smart AI will be able to lobby for and explain why the innovations it will bring to the table are in the best interests of humanity, and presumably will quickly gain the wisdom needed to “outwit” those who will immediately and irrationally argue against human interaction with machine intelligences.

C’mon Yahoo, C’mon Yang! This investor is still optimistic!

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WSJ’s recent Yahoo story does not sound very optimistic about Yahoo’s potential to recapture the former glory Yahoo enjoyed in terms of stock price. The gist is that new CEO Yang is not going to “overhaul” the company, especially in the area of advertising sales where Yahoo clearly has enormous potential for bigger profits, and even a shot at eventually co-dominating the online advertising landscape.

It is this potential that interests me as a YHOO investor. Google’s done a fine job of monetizing internet activity in the search space, and GOOG’s capitalization of some 160 billion dollars reflects this fact. Yahoo was arguably too early to the PPC game with the purchase of Overture – the early leader in the PPC space. My assumption is that this kept Yahoo from innovating aggressively and allowed Google to sweep in with their contextual matching brilliancy and eat Yahoo’s PPC profit lunch. This feast continues despite the fact that Yahoo retains a significant portion of total online search activity and also remains in a position to monetize a large amount of other types of internet traffic.

Also, Yahoo’s making great strides in the Web 2.0 space thanks to a kick-ass developer team. Yahoo’s Flickr remains the best photo sharing application with a huge community. If Yahoo could use their 2.0 cleverness to crack the nut of better monetizing the traffic spawned by Flickr and even other non-Yahoo online communities like Myspace or Facebook it would be helpful to the bottom line.

Yahoo remains capitalized at a small fraction of Google – about 20%. This is consistent with the pessimism expressed in the WSJ article but does not seem consistent with Yahoo’s profit potential in the exploding world of online advertising.

There used to be a game where Yahoo employees would sneak into the Google lunch room to eat a free and delicious Google lunch. Jerry Yang, how about providing a free lunch at Yahoo and then focusing the employee’s attention on taking back all those free and delicious PPC profits?

Less glibly I’d suggest you focus on the Yahoo Publisher Network evangelism and monetization. So far Yahoo has failed – fairly dramatically – to gain publisher interest and loyalty in this lucrative sector of online advertising. Google adsense publishers are ripe for change and innovation in this space. Make it so!

Programmable Web continues to rock

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If you are interested in how mashups are shaking up the web world, or interested in mashing up your own content, John Musser’s Programmable Web is the best place to start.    This is a  very well-designed website with enormous content depth.   John’s listed thousands of mashups and APIs and categorized them in helpful ways.

Mashups are reshaping the internet in very interesting and dynamic ways and will continue to do this for some time.    For me it’s interesting to see the model of the early internet kind of “swing back” and again be characterized by information sharing rather than the “closed walls” that came about when big money started to flow into the system.  However this poses a challenge for new companies based on mashed up content because ownership of the content that results from a mashup is not always easy to define.   At Mashup Camp 2 I remember talking with Venture Capitalist Peter Rip who at that time felt that mashups *of themselves* were not the key value proposition, rather how the mashup might enhance the prospects of an existing company.   I’m still digesting his notion because it may lie at the heart of how most websites will shake out in the future.

As a user I’m inclined to want an internet that is free or very cheap, very open, very rich with content, and has few restrictions on the use or mashing up of content.   However as a travel website entrepreneur I don’t relish the thought of creating a great site only to have it’s content and ideas nabbed without any compensation.

Brain Mind Institute

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Some of the best AI work is now coming from Dr Markram at the Brain Mind institute.   Read his bio for a glimpse into the “mind” of the machine.   This institute may be the first place where a computer will become conscious and self aware, though it’s also possible this will come from a Google, MSN, or Yahoo server farm thanks to the massive parallel processing.    However, those places are not focused on AI where BMI is seeking to reverse engineer the human brain, and has made a lot of progress in this direction.

Save the Children

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Charlie Rose is hosting Cokie Roberts of ABC news and former Senator Bill First who both are working for children around the world as part of the superb efforts of “Save the Children” which is working for global health, poverty, and education for all children.  Roberts is pointing out the fact that is routinely and tragically overlooked – helping reduce poverty in the developing world will *decrease* births and is thus likely to *increase* standards of living for everybody.     Many fiscal conservatives fail to “do the math” on global development – an excersize that leads you to fund development efforts at very high levels rather than funding military efforts which generally have very dubious returns on the investment.

Frist, when asked why he wasn’t running for President, said he wanted to focus on his work to save children for the next few years.  Bravo to him and to Save the Children for this excellent work.

Canyon Creek Lakes, Trinity Alps, Northern California

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Above Lower Canyon Creek Lake looking South

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

We continued our labor day tradition of meeting our great friends in Weaverville, CA and then hiking in to the Trinity Alps Wilderness along the trail up to the Canyon Creek Lakes.    We camp about 4 miles in and then hike into the lakes the next day which is another 4 miles.    It’s a fantastic trip with the kind of scenery you find pretty much only in Northern California – sweeping mountain vistas, smooth granite outcrops and peaks, pristine mountain lakes, streams, and waterfalls.    Azure blues and deep greens and a star filled sky complete with the recent meteor shower.   It doesn’t get much better than that and the Trinity Alps are one of my favorite places in the whole world.

One really cool addition to the experience this year was looking at the hike through Google Earth, where by tilting the imagery you can really get a neat feel for the vistas along the actual hike.     We also found some photos of our first trip in to the Canyon Creek Lakes some 22 years ago. The scenery had not changed but … um … I think we have

Portland Search Marketing Group, SearchFest 2008, and SES San Jose

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Here’s a great post from Scott about SES San Jose. The Portland SEM community is growing fast and I wish I could get up there more often and attend some meetings and hang with my fellow Oregon techno peeples, but Portland is almost as far away from me as Silicon Valley, the undisputed capital of … well … most of the really neat stuff happening online these days. In fact my frequent trips to Silicon Valley may be skewing my perception of how fast things are changing. For example very few people I know here in Oregon, and few of my hundreds of close relatives back east are on Facebook or Flickr. It’s even tough to get people to join Flickr so they can see pix of themselves I’ve taken. Ludditism is no longer the problem for most people, rather it’s just silly human stubbornness about technology.

In any case I do want to plug Scott and the SEM PDX conference coming up in March of 2008 –“SearchFest 2008”.

Here is the blurb from the SEM PDX mail I just got:

SEMpdx Presents Searchfest 2008
When: Monday, March 10, 2008
Where: Portland Zoo
Format: All Day Event with Dual Tracks

Confirmed Speakers (to date):
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Matt McGee, Marchex / Small Business SEM
Jeff Pruitt, SEMPO / ICrossing
Stoney deGeyter, Pole Position Marketing
John Andrews, Competitive Webmastering / Master of Sphinn
Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
Paul Colligan, The Affiliate Guy
Dan Harbison, Portland Trailblazers / Iamatrailblazersfan.com

More top speakers to be announced soon. Stay tuned!