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The following are extracts from Blogs hosted in the Zdnet Community on www.Zdnet.co.uk - they will tell you about some of the significant changes that are happening at Cnet.
Matt Loney is the Editor and Site Director of www.Zdnet.co.uk at Cnet Networks. This is an extract from his Zdnet Community Blog:
"The
approach that we're taking with Ultra Knowledge relies on a statistical
analysis of the words used in every article whether HTML (a web page)
or PDF (one of the 70,000+ technology white papers in our Resources
section). From this the Ultraknowledge search engine has a known
universe of words and phrases; it knows where they occur, how often and
perhaps most importantly, in what context.
You can get an idea of these
relationships if you enter 'Google' into the search bar on ZDNet.
Alongside the search results you'll get two extra features: related
articles, and related tags. Let's
look at the tag cloud first, and here's a snapshot that I took earlier
(note that this will change over time as more articles are added to the
site):
None of these tags were added manually, yet from its
analysis the search engine knows that, for instance, "Kai Fu Lee",
"Adsense", "PageRank" and "sponsored links" are terms that are closely
associated with Google. "Google Mini" did not make it into the top 30
terms, so is not included in the box. What we're doing here is rather
than saying here are words that other people associate with "Google",
we're saying here are words and terms that are statistically important
to what you searched for. And this is about turning search into
navigation; giving people more clues about what they are searching for
to help them in their quest."
Read the full text of Matt Loney's Blog
Until the end of 2006 Mike Barratt was the Operations Director of Cnet Networks UK. The following is an extract from Mike's Blog that he still runs on www.zdnet.co.uk:
"Searching without thinking
For too long search design has been
dictated either by the search engine technology i.e. "Keywords" or by
the agregators (Google/Yahoo/MSN) ranking algorithms. Both have their
benefits but neither necessarily serves the user the best.
Our new search engine has the ability to automatically create
relevant tags and topics related to the search term. It's still early
days for this type of technology but we believe that this type of
search is the only one that considers the user first. Up to 75% of
search terms are a single word and our most popular search term is
often "Microsoft".
Given the size and scope of Microsoft's market, this would lead you to
believe that the user doesn't know how to search for what they are
really looking for. And the truth is, most users are working blindfold
when it comes to understanding conventional search syntax so they go in
one direction until they bump into something, re-adjust and try again.
By creating tag clouds of the most relevant tags and terms, we are
narrowing down the search for the user and helping them towards what
they were really looking for. "
Read the full text on Mike Barrett's Blog.
Another entry from Mike Barrett's Zdnet Blog:
"User Generated content - What are they talking about?
As I outlined in my previous post,
our new search engine is designed to tag all content consistently
regardless of where it originated from. We've started with the
editorial and vendor content and will soon be rolling it out to include
UGC. Watch this space..."
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