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Tag: Search Queries

  • Amazon Using AI to Understand Searches

    Amazon Using AI to Understand Searches

    Amazon is using artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand search queries and why a person may be looking for something.

    Understanding why a customer searches for a product is just as import as knowing what they searched for. Knowing the context can help a retailer make relevant recommendations for other products that not only compliment the item being searched for, but the activity or reason behind the search. Amazon is intent on cracking that piece of the puzzle, and is applying AI to the problem.

    “In a paper accepted to the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, my colleagues and I present a new neural-network-based system for predicting context of use from customer queries,” writes Adrian Boteanu. “From the query ‘adidas mens pants’, for instance, the system predicts the activity ‘running.’

    “In tests, human reviewers agreed, on average, with 81% of the system’s predictions, indicating that the system was identifying patterns that could improve the quality of Amazon’s product discovery algorithms.”

    As Amazon continues to improve its algorithms, shoppers should see increasingly relevant shopping recommendations and the research could open a whole new arena for personalized digital shopping assistants.

  • Google Webmaster Tools ‘Search Queries’ Feature Gets Some New Tweaks

    Google has announced a couple of changes to the Search Queries feature in Webmaster Tools, improving stats for mobile sites and getting rid of rounding.

    For webmasters who manage mobile sites on separate URLs from the desktop versions (like m.example.com), Google will now show queries where the m. pages appeared in results for mobile browsers and queries where Google applied Skip Redirect.

    Skip Redirect

    “This means that, while search results displayed the desktop URL, the user was automatically directed to the corresponding m. version of the URL (thus saving the user from latency of a server-side redirect),” explains developer programs tech lead Maile Ohye. “Prior to this Search Queries improvement, Webmaster Tools reported Skip Redirect impressions with the desktop URL. Now we’ve consolidated information when Skip Redirect is triggered, so that impressions, clicks, and CTR are calculated solely with the verified m. site, making your mobile statistics more understandable.”

    The change enabling users to see search queries data without being rounded will become visible in Webmaster Tools over the next few days.

    “We hope this makes it easier for you to see the finer details of how users are finding your website, and when they’re clicking through,” says Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller.

    We wonder if these tweaks are related to Google’s recent call for ideas from users for Webmaster Tools improvements.

    Image: Google

  • Searching Google Plus? There’s a Query for That

    With all the tech writers and evangelists on Google+, it’s become something of a fount of information. However, because these streams of information come quite quickly in terms of Google+ updates, keeping track of it all can be a little overwhelming, even in this, the infant stage of Google’s social network platform. While you can search Google+ while logged into the service, is there another way to access all of this content without being forced to parse through these updates?

    Thanks to a technique publicized by Bill Handy, there is. In his “How to Search Google Plus” post, Handy details the technique, which isn’t difficult at all, provided you have Google Chrome. The process involves adding a new search engine to the Google Chrome’s list, and entering the query in question in the applicable URL text box. The query in question is as follows:

    {google:baseURL}search?q=site:plus.google.com inurl:posts/* %s

    Handy even features a video showing how to execute this very simple adjustment to Google Chrome:

    A quick tutorial on how to search google plus status updates.


    For those of you who say Handy should just follow the sources of information he’s interested in finding, he has the following response:

    I’ve never been a fan of following people. Instead I prefer to follow topics or key words. It provides a more holistic overview of the conversations which surround those topics. For example, if I follow a group of individuals who love social media I will likely think social media is always awesome (it isn’t). Following (searching) the words “social media” most often used will provide me a bit better understanding because it will bring forth differing points of view on the same topic.

    With that, we have Handy’s nifty little query string, which produces results that look like the following:

    <a href=Google+ Search” />

    As you can see, the appearance is very much that of a normal Google SERP, so there shouldn’t be much if any confusion when executing Handy’s query. In fact, the search string is the most important component, and because Handy shared his findings, users know have the capability to conduct keyword searches of Google+ content without having to sift through all kinds of different posts.