Hope everyone had a great holiday and now it’s back to business. My business brain got turned on yesterday as I read the article on the front of the NY Times business section. If you haven’t read the piece on how an unscrupulous web vendor grew his business by exploiting Google’s algorithm (my guess is it’s the same with the other search engines as well), you can read it here. The gist of it is this dirtball welcomes and precipitates customer complaints, saying they vault his business higher in Internet search results. It’s really frightening but in the almost 48 hours since it was published (on the web site Saturday night) a lot has happened. Most importantly, it shows me once again why newspapers won’t die any time soon. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Search
Your Algorithm
I was reading the article in Wired on the Google algorithm. Interesting stuff even if you’re just a web searcher, and for those of us who talk about SEO from time to time, it’s fascinating.
One statement stood out:
The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning
My immediate thought was that he was right about most businesses, not just that of search. The Wired piece details the hundreds of ways Google’s formula manipulates a search to try to get precisely to the point of the user’s question. Their algorithm is a highly refined way of doing just that. My theory is that we all need one.
Many firms go about their business making few or no attempts to gain this kind of in-depth understanding of user wants and needs. You can rest assured that you can count those that have an algorithm to do so based on customer input on your fingers and toes. Yes, I’m aware of marketing dashboards and monitoring of social buzz. Those are both great but think about Google’s formula applied to all that social content, feedback cards, surveys, and other customer interaction. I wonder what nuances would surface?
How about you – got an algorithm? How do you figure out what your customers, partners, and prospects want based on the information you gather?
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Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud
Value Added
- Image via CrunchBase
When you go to a restaurant, they don’t charge you only for the cost of the ingredients used in preparing whatever it is you’re eating. In addition, you’re paying for the preparation of those ingredients, the people who serve you and see that you’re comfortable, the building itself, and a profit margin. What you’re really paying for is the value added by the kitchen staff to those ingredients and the rest of the staff in serving them. Continue reading
Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud, What's Going On
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