Don't engines use Synonyms yet?

#1

I notice our website (http://www.thermoteknix.com/) is 3rd in the google
rankings for Miniature Infrared Camera, but nowhere for Small Infrared
Camera. I thought the engines were smarter than that. I'm thinking it must
be fairly easy to use Synonyms (especially in English), to find a "root"
expression - or token - to represent a word or phrase, making the search
term a little more generic. In reality, "keyword" is a rather unforgiving
concept. Don't you agree?

#2

Agree, which is why there are people like us around.

#3

Fred Hedges wrote:

Quote:

I notice our website (http://www.thermoteknix.com/) is 3rd in the google
rankings for Miniature Infrared Camera, but nowhere for Small Infrared
Camera. I thought the engines were smarter than that. I'm thinking it must
be fairly easy to use Synonyms (especially in English), to find a "root"
expression - or token - to represent a word or phrase, making the search
term a little more generic. In reality, "keyword" is a rather unforgiving
concept. Don't you agree?

No, it isn't.

Miniature and small are to different descriptions. Where miniature
would, from my point of view, be something like very small.

So how do you think a search engine is going to interpret all those
litle differences and listing your site, even if the words are not on
your pages in, for various synonyms?

The rules are very easy: if the words are on your site and in links to
it, Goolge will show your site for that words if searched for them.

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on the amount of words,
the theme of your website, the links placed to it etc.

--
Website design:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/
Search engine optimization:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/being-found.html

#4

On Fri, 05 May 2006 17:36:59 +0200, tonnie <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote:

Quote:

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on ...
the theme of your website

Hang on. Does it? How does a search engine determine what the theme of
your website is, if it doesn't know how to interpret words or phrases?

--
______PretLetters:

Quote:

#5

__/ [ Fred Hedges ] on Friday 05 May 2006 16:18 \__

Quote:

I notice our website (http://www.thermoteknix.com/) is 3rd in the google
rankings for Miniature Infrared Camera, but nowhere for Small Infrared
Camera. I thought the engines were smarter than that. I'm thinking it
must be fairly easy to use Synonyms (especially in English), to find a
"root" expression - or token - to represent a word or phrase, making the
search
term a little more generic. In reality, "keyword" is a rather unforgiving
concept. Don't you agree?

I fully agree, but the implementational issues are tremendous. Merely any
word has a synonym, or two, or more. These words, in turn have their own
synonyms, which may not be suitable for that synonym first one (it's a
graph then, not a tree; and the graph is not cyclic either).

Now, in search engine hyperspace you have axes for the different keywords
and each one is assumed to be quite independent and isolated (setting
aside proximity tests). If you start to merge dimensions in a fuzzy way
(relying on synonyms that are suitable to a lesser or greater extent), the
complexity becomes vast. Is already /is/ vast at present.

There is one alternative however. When you type in a search phrase, you
could opt for a slower process (or one which gets distributed across
multiple machines or gets hyperthreaded), whereby your words are
interchanged by known synonyms and queried in isolation. Then you apply
some relevance weighting (to account more for the original phrase) and
merge the results accordingly. This might work rather nicely, but again,
it's very computationally expensive and it might not produce more relevant
results. This could maybe be added as an option with a tickbox, but it'll
confuse users. Simplicity is better...

'Nuff rambling...

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Slashdot is standard-compliant... in Japan"
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
4:35pm up 7 days 23:32, 12 users, load average: 1.01, 0.87, 0.70
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine

#6

Okay, I don't want to enter into a debate over machine understanding here,
because lets face it, the whole area is complex and difficult and has seen
huge amounts of research amounting to, err, not much progress but lets take
my miniature infrared camera as an example. As a potential user or
customer, I might write "small" or "very small" infrared camera, rather than
the more specific Miniature which for Marketing purposes, we prefer. That
being the case, I suppose our website should talk about our camera as being
small or very small, rather than miniature. However, to extend this
somewhat, if we did this with our entire site and all of the keywords we
want to "touch", it would end up looking like it was designed to be read by
a 3 year old. It's one thing to talk to your customers and quite another to
talk to a search engine. Somehow, we have to do both. So is SOE in general
about dumbing down? It would seem so, at least until search engine
"understanding" improves.

"tonnie" <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote

Quote:

Fred Hedges wrote:
I notice our website (http://www.thermoteknix.com/) is 3rd in the google
rankings for Miniature Infrared Camera, but nowhere for Small Infrared
Camera. I thought the engines were smarter than that. I'm thinking it
must be fairly easy to use Synonyms (especially in English), to find a
"root" expression - or token - to represent a word or phrase, making the
search term a little more generic. In reality, "keyword" is a rather
unforgiving concept. Don't you agree?

No, it isn't.

Miniature and small are to different descriptions. Where miniature would,
from my point of view, be something like very small.

So how do you think a search engine is going to interpret all those litle
differences and listing your site, even if the words are not on your pages
in, for various synonyms?

The rules are very easy: if the words are on your site and in links to it,
Goolge will show your site for that words if searched for them.

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on the amount of words,
the theme of your website, the links placed to it etc.

--
Website design:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/
Search engine optimization:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/being-found.html

#7

__/ [ Fred Hedges ] on Friday 05 May 2006 16:58 \__

Quote:

"tonnie" <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote in message
news:4c19osF13kkboU1 (AT) individual (DOT) net...
Fred Hedges wrote:
I notice our website (http://www.thermoteknix.com/) is 3rd in the google
rankings for Miniature Infrared Camera, but nowhere for Small Infrared
Camera. I thought the engines were smarter than that. I'm thinking it
must be fairly easy to use Synonyms (especially in English), to find a
"root" expression - or token - to represent a word or phrase, making the
search term a little more generic. In reality, "keyword" is a rather
unforgiving concept. Don't you agree?

No, it isn't.

Miniature and small are to different descriptions. Where miniature would,
from my point of view, be something like very small.

So how do you think a search engine is going to interpret all those litle
differences and listing your site, even if the words are not on your pages
in, for various synonyms?

The rules are very easy: if the words are on your site and in links to it,
Google will show your site for that words if searched for them.

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on the amount of words,
the theme of your website, the links placed to it etc.

To the OP: That's SEO. Evil yet effective. It often seems like exploitation
of the limitations of existing, feasible algorithms.

Quote:

Okay, I don't want to enter into a debate over machine understanding here,
because lets face it, the whole area is complex and difficult and has seen
huge amounts of research amounting to, err, not much progress but lets take
my miniature infrared camera as an example. As a potential user or
customer, I might write "small" or "very small" infrared camera, rather
than
the more specific Miniature which for Marketing purposes, we prefer. That
being the case, I suppose our website should talk about our camera as being
small or very small, rather than miniature. However, to extend this
somewhat, if we did this with our entire site and all of the keywords we
want to "touch", it would end up looking like it was designed to be read by
a 3 year old. It's one thing to talk to your customers and quite another
to
talk to a search engine. Somehow, we have to do both. So is SOE in
general
about dumbing down? It would seem so, at least until search engine
"understanding" improves.

You make an excellent point. Many Webmasters are steering away from
Britishism, for example (think about writing 'optimize' instead of
'optimise'). Some intentionally include both, which does contribute the page
or its reader _at all_. Bear in mind that search engines have a certain
capacity and they come with deficiencies that must be accommodated. An
optimised site that receives plenty of traffic is often badly presented and
even incoherent. It may contain irrelevant links and its structure may be
adverse to logic too. Take it or leave it...

Best wishes,

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Useless fact: Sharks are immune to cancer
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
5:05pm up 8 days 0:02, 12 users, load average: 0.19, 0.54, 0.67
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project

#8

Barbara de Zoete wrote:

Quote:

On Fri, 05 May 2006 17:36:59 +0200, tonnie <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote:

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on ...
the theme of your website

Hang on. Does it? How does a search engine determine what the theme of
your website is, if it doesn't know how to interpret words or phrases?

Recognizing words and a theme on a page, is something different than
knowing all the synonyms of a specific word.

A theme can be brought to Google's attention by using the words in your
anchor text, titles, text etc.

But come on Barbara, you know these kind of things.

--
Website design:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/
Search engine optimization:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/being-found.html

#9

On Fri, 05 May 2006 18:26:14 +0200, tonnie <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote:

Quote:

Barbara de Zoete wrote:
On Fri, 05 May 2006 17:36:59 +0200, tonnie <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote:

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on ...
the theme of your website
Hang on. Does it? How does a search engine determine what the theme
of your website is, if it doesn't know how to interpret words or
phrases?

Recognizing words and a theme on a page, is something different than
knowing all the synonyms of a specific word.

True. I just thought you meant the theme of the website, which is
something larger than some individual pages. I wonder what for example
Google might make of my site, when it comes to 'theme'. The pages are
clear enough, but the entire site is very diverse.

Quote:

But come on Barbara, you know these kind of things.

No, well... I just thought I read something that was new to me. I guess I
misread you.

--
______PretLetters:

Quote:

#10

Fred Hedges wrote:

[snip - restored topposting]

Quote:

"tonnie" <t.prasing (AT) chello (DOT) nl> wrote in message
news:4c19osF13kkboU1 (AT) individual (DOT) net...

Fred Hedges wrote:

I notice our website (http://www.thermoteknix.com/) is 3rd in the google
rankings for Miniature Infrared Camera, but nowhere for Small Infrared
Camera. I thought the engines were smarter than that. I'm thinking it
must be fairly easy to use Synonyms (especially in English), to find a
"root" expression - or token - to represent a word or phrase, making the
search term a little more generic. In reality, "keyword" is a rather
unforgiving concept. Don't you agree?

No, it isn't.

Miniature and small are to different descriptions. Where miniature would,
from my point of view, be something like very small.

So how do you think a search engine is going to interpret all those litle
differences and listing your site, even if the words are not on your pages
in, for various synonyms?

The rules are very easy: if the words are on your site and in links to it,
Goolge will show your site for that words if searched for them.

Where in the serps your site will show, depends on the amount of words,
the theme of your website, the links placed to it etc.

Okay, I don't want to enter into a debate over machine understanding here,
because lets face it, the whole area is complex and difficult and has seen
huge amounts of research amounting to, err, not much progress but lets take
my miniature infrared camera as an example. As a potential user or
customer, I might write "small" or "very small" infrared camera, rather than
the more specific Miniature which for Marketing purposes, we prefer. That
being the case, I suppose our website should talk about our camera as being
small or very small, rather than miniature. However, to extend this
somewhat, if we did this with our entire site and all of the keywords we
want to "touch", it would end up looking like it was designed to be read by
a 3 year old. It's one thing to talk to your customers and quite another to
talk to a search engine. Somehow, we have to do both. So is SOE in general
about dumbing down? It would seem so, at least until search engine
"understanding" improves.

Yes, we have to, if we want to get the positions we want. Everyone seems
to think the algorithme is difficult, it isn't. It is a simple process
to determine the value of your page in totall and for specific keywords.
Nothing more and nothing less.

The difficulty lies in the fact we don't know _exactly_ how it works.

--
Website design:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/
Search engine optimization:
http://vision2form.nl/websitedesign/being-found.html