I checked out Insights for Search and was a little confounded about what I saw  for some industry terms.

• “web marketing” search volume is trending down
• “internet marketing” search volume is trending down
• “search engine marketing” search volume is trending down

Take a look at “web marketing” in Insights:

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And, according to analysts covering Google’s recent earning miss:

Google’s core search business slowed more sharply than expected, even in the U.S.

They merely shift the spending from the PC to the mobile device.

• In January 2011, one client example had almost 4,000 visits resulting from mobile devices.
• In January 2012, that same client example had almost 13,00 visits resulting from mobile devices

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2. SEO

People are becoming more savvy about search marketing. Search behavior is changing and more specific terms are being used compared to a few years ago as searches are becoming more focused. Businesses have recognized the importance of ranking well for their brand name and for relevant search queries.

Check out the trend below for “seo marketing”:

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3. Social Media Marketing

No need to explain this one.

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In their recent earnings, Google has seen the shift to mobile make its impact.  Companies have to adapt as visitor behavior changes. Developing a search strategy that fully realizes the search behavior of your potential customers is paramount in adapting to the fast moving online world.

“Web Marketing” is still stronger than ever but the name of the game has changed. Its become fractured into smaller and smaller sub-segments.

Excerpt from the book Digital Deli (1984)

Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be

by Stephen Wozniak

“Steve Jobs was a friend of mine from high school. We were introduced because we had two things in common: electronics and pranks. It turned out that he had a tremendous drive to start a company. He had worked at Atari and had become friends with some of the key people there, including Nolan Bushnell, the founder. Nolan was his idol. Steve wanted to have a successful product, go out and start selling it, and make some money. He also had excellent product ideas for the upcoming personal computer.

To produce the Apple I, Steve and I formed a partnership. We didn’t sell many Apple Is the first year. We built them right in our garage. At first we expected to sell circuit boards at the HomeBrew Club:  just put your chips in and it’ll work. Then we got a $50,000 order from a local store and we were in heaven.

The trouble was how to get the money to build a hundred computers – they might cost over a hundred dollars to build. Steve went to a local parts supplier and talked them into giving us a lot of parts on thirty days net credit. It was very unusual for them to give us credit, because we didn’t own anything. We didn’t own houses. We didn’t even own our cars. But Steve is very persuasive. We’d get the parts and then stuff them into the circuit boards, have them soldered, get them back in the garage and test them. And we could turn the whole cycle around in ten days and get paid. It worked really great because we only had one level of management.”

Thirty years ago last week, IBM  introduced its first personal computer - the 5150.

Its very reliable. The computer never has failed me when I work from home.

Maybe because the computer is encased in steel.

And a very happy 80th anniversary to the Bakelite telephone!

I think this one I have in the pic above is a Model 500 Rotary Bakelite Phone.

My productivity does suffer a little when I work from home.

Time for an upgrade?

Linking out sometimes gets the short shrift to conserve PageRank to internal links. But linking out can give your web page something that is important to the search engines. The appearance of a page’s quality, credibility and salience.

Two quotes that back up this claim:

“In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”  – Matt Cutts

“Writing descriptive anchor text, the clickable words in a link, is a useful signal to help search engines and users alike to better understand your content.” – Maile Ohye

So, in much the same way that the PageRank algorithm found it useful to score target pages from anchor text, the text in the  anchor text quite frequently relates to the description of the page content and is used to gather information about that page. More specifically, the anchor text is used in improving page categorization or classification of a page.

Is linking out a ranking factor? Some seo’s suggest it does not influence rankings. Others say yes.

But it appears that Google is giving the anchor text more credence than just the regular text in the content and not just for the pages that they link to.

In my opinion, web-page classification has become more sophisticated and faster since Panda.  Panda has improved the accuracy of  classifiers that use both anchor text and content on the page.

This applies to both internal and external links and influences the  co-training algorithm.

As a result, you may want to follow a few do’s and dont’s:

Do’s:

• Do create descriptive text links that are related to the page category
• Do link to pages of high authority on related topics with your keyphrases in the anchor text
• Do surround the text link with normal language

Don’ts:

• Don’t link out using a large number of unrelated links
• Don’t repeat the exact same keywords in the text links (use Google Sets instead)
• Don’t link out to a page that looks spammy

Since Google’s Panda update, I’ve been looking for a clear definition of what Google means by a “document classifier”. Here’s an excerpt  that mentions it in their official Google blog:

“.. we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

Until now, I haven’t been able to get a definitive explanation of how Google defines a “document classifier”. But I believe I have found what I was looking for in Peter Norvig‘s textbook “Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach“. Peter Norvig is currently the Director of Research at Google and was formerly the Director of Search Quality at Google.

Here is an excerpt from chapter 13 “Uncertainty”:

“Text categorization is the task of assigning a given document to one of a fixed set of categories, on the basis of text it contains. Naive Bayes models are often used for this task. In these models, the query variable is the document category, and the “effect” variables are the presence or absence of each word in the language;  the assumption is that the words occur independently in the documents, with frequencies determined by document category.”

Once a document is classified into a category based on the text/content, patterns are looked for a given probability distribution. If your website fits that classification and frequency distribution of keywords, you may or may not find yourself  on the wrong side of the tracks.

I took a  look back in history from when the telephone first arrived to the mobile devices of today.  Making communication easy spawns an addiction to the facilitating platform and an addiction to it will always will be rampant among the young.

“The telephone has been accepted without hesitation by the younger generation, but it has suggested uneasy questions to older persons who have not been accustomed to it all their lives.” -1903

1903 – “It’s Appalling”- Phone accepted without hesitation by younger generation

1948 – The teenagers have tied up telephone communications

1963 – Telephonitis is a disease of adolescence

1972 – For six years my son ate, slept and lived in a small phone booth

1989 – Younger generation has phone addiction!

2009 – Too Much Texting Taking a Toll on Teenagers

2011- Young generation addicted to mobile phones

What are we in for next?

Click here to see.

The rise in popularity of Facebook has similarities.

Mark Zuckerberg stated that:

“In fact, in some ways Facebook is like a telephone conversation, with all your friends on the same call. But on this call, your friends can share photos, text, political summons to action, video, and music, or can click to make purchases.”

A video post with a quick < minute tutorial on how to find the number pages that have received a visit by Google.

Enormous Profits

The world was profoundly changed. A web connects the country and a communications giant controls almost 80% of the market share of that web. Huge amounts of information are delivered at speeds never before seen by mankind. The costs involved in creating the infrastructure to create this spider-like system grant it a near monopoly and the company makes enormous profits with margins approaching 30%.

This company is held in the public mind as providing an invaluable service and projects the belief that the information it provides is not tainted by preferential bias from outside parties.

The “Victorian Internet”

The name of the company is Western Union. The year is 1869. It is the age of the telegraph and the “Victorian Internet“.

On August 16,1869, Western Union puts out its monthly journal that states, “There has been, unquestionably, much progress made in the promotion of greater efficiency in telegraphic operations,” and further states that, “The difficulty in making such a service as this possible…which requires that no such message shall have preference over another, and that each must take its turn.”

A Financial Empire

Just a few years earlier in 1865, a Western Union telegraph operator had provided news of President Lincoln’s assassination to a favored Oregon newspaper ahead of other competing newspapers on the west coast. The Oregonian newspaper that had paid off the telegraph operator scooped its competition and enjoyed higher sales.

The owner of that newspaper built a financial empire, in part, by gaming the system.

Paid Links and the Lincoln Assassination

Jump ahead 146 years from the Lincoln assassination to February 12th, 2011. The New York Times breaks a story about fortunes made by a company gaming the system of another company that controls a web of links. Paid links artificially boosted the rankings of a company that, no doubt, enjoyed considerable profits for a time.

This time around, the offending links were found out.

Today, that company that is concerned about its public perception is Google.

I had heard about the Jeopardy Watson challenge before, but it didn’t sink in until I saw a recent post by Joe Hall and his point about the new ways of information retrieval that are upon us.

To gain a little insight into what is in store for humanity, check out the IBM YouTube post:

Click to View Watson Trailer

The Watson Jeopardy episode airs February 14th.

IBM’s Watson brings to mind a science fiction story by Terry Bisson:

from THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat?”

While watching The Family Guy, I had often wondered where Stewie Griffin’s catch phrase “What the Deuce?”  came from.

Stewie will often say his catch phrase at times of astonishment.

Turns out the “What the Deuce?” was once a euphemism for “What the Devil?”.

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Using Google’s new Ngram viewer, we can see that the catch phrase began falling out of favor soon after the start of the 1920′s.

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So what happened?

Why did the phrase “What the Deuce?” fall out of favor?

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It may have been the loosening of restraint for certain topics or it may have been the overuse of the old phrase “What the Deuce?” which blunted the phrase’s emotional edge.

I can give no definite cause and effect.

Out with the old and in with the new.