Lured by the promise of chocolate I attended the SEOLondon pissup following SES London on Thursday night. If it wasn’t for the said chocolate (I’m a simple creature really, just give me tea, chocolate and a foot rub and I’m a happy little bunny) I would not have had the courage to gatecrash go along. I mean these people were the real deal of search types - they knew what they were on about in this minefield of an area . . . or so I thought . . .
Okay maybe that statement was a bit harsh - I know many of them are brilliant at what they do, they just don’t go on about it, especially in a pub when the alcohol is freely flowing. What did surprise me slightly though was the seeming lack of comprehension as to why a librarian could be interested in search. This is something that I would have thought to have been obvious - last time I checked search is based on information retrieval. Sure there are many differences but ultimately the concepts stem from the same pond.
In the simplest of terms: Search engines = indexing information so it can be retrieved ; Librarians (via a catalogue) = indexing information so it can be retrieved. In-bound and out-bound links correlate nicely to references and citations. The areas of bibliometrics and citation analysis has been measuring and analysing the quality and authority of ‘links’ for decades. It is a well established fact that approx only 30% of citations can be viewed as being accurate, the others are incorrect (’broken’), or they are vanity citations, many have nothing really to do with the content of the paper and the list of reasons goes on. The intrigues and attempts to promote ‘your’ work above that of others and to gain ‘funding’ is not new. These issues have existed since at least the 17th century when the practice of referencing emerged in the scientific world. Bibliometricians (isn’t that the coolest job title?) and librarians have been measuring and analysing such behaviours, and trying to come up with ways to combat this skewing of authority long before search (as we know it) became a common term.
I am now starting to have doubts as to whether many in the SEO/M industry truly understand the theory and history of search and information retrieval. Again this is a very broad statement and one which I am hoping is out of line. I recently read a rather interesting snippet regarding a search engine that allowed users to rate the results (wish I could find the link - will endeavour to). The comments proved for very interesting reading as the majority of respondents were rather lavish with their praise in the originality of the idea (again I hasten to add I realise that as with citations, comments also need to be taken with a grain of salt as to who is responding and more importantly who is not). The concept however is not all that new - I am gathering the respondents are not terribly familiar with Salton or Spark-Jones. For the past few decades such experiments have often reared their head only to fade away again. User ranking is favourite and common topic amongst post-grad students.
As many of you know I am rather vocal in my preference for practical and applicable concepts rather than hardcore theory, however to really understand an application, or more importantly to be able to develop new ones, then some grounding in theory is necessary. The more I read and the more I see, the more I start to feel that many in SEO industry don’t have this grounding in IR theory. I feel that many of them would be hard pressed to jot down the formula for precision and recall, or tf*idf, or actively engage in the debate on whether Latent Semantic Indexing (be it the old skool or kicking new-ish style with a probabilistic layer) is of any relevance in search, or the impact of Anaphoric Resolution, or even to be able to construct a working taxonomy. I am not saying this a bad thing - I don’t know. What I am saying is that I have been somewhat shocked by the seeming lack of understanding as to the library and information science world’s contribution to that of search. I hope I am wrong in this feeling.
. . . I think I may have just found the topic for my presentation at Barcamp Brighton 2 . . . right now however am off to hunt down the dark chocolate with orange I have tucked away somewhere . . .
“Into the Galaxy”, Midnight Juggernauts
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