About Contributor Chris Silver Smith
- Number of posts contributed
- 234
- Website
- Netconcepts
- Email Chris Silver
- Profile
- Chris is Lead Search Strategist for Netconcepts, working primarily upon support and development of their GravityStream product - a "near turn-key SEO application" which helps businesses with non-optimal, dynamic sites to turn optimized nearly overnight. Chris was previously Head of Technology & Development for Idearc (Idearc was recently spun off from Verizon) SuperPages.com where he worked for over a decade. His projects there included research and development, local search technology advancement, and design of numerous applications and interfaces including Map-Based Search, Campus Area Yellow Pages, weather forecasting systems, E-Cards, XML APIs, RSS feeds, Wireless applications, and more. He was awarded a number of individual and team awards by the corporation, and his was cited for increasing the overall revenue of Superpages. Chris was an early researcher in organic search engine optimization as far back as 1997, and his work was deployed to form the foundation of SEO initiatives for the Superpages sites. Chris was founder and Chair of the Idearc SEO Council, pulling together individuals from across the organization who worked on elements of natural search optimization. Chris also has a background in CAD, scientific illustration, and cartography from his previous work as Manager of Administration of Texas A&M University's Cartographic Service Unit, where he assisted with portions of the university's earliest website presence. Chris has five patents pending and his work has been published in a number of books, professional journals, and web sites, including SearchEngineLand.com where he writes on Local Search topics. Personal Website of Chris Silver Smith: http://www.silvery.com
Posts by Chris Silver:
Google to launch ‘Friend Connect’ tonight
Google’s newest foray into social media will launch tonight in preview release at Campfire One. Google’s announcement about Friend Connect states that webmasters may use the service to easily set up social media sharing services on their sites, encouraging online communities to develop and potentially help to promote the site. Google Friend Connect functionality includes user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, reviews, and third-party applications provided through Google’s OpenSocial developer community. (more…)
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/12/2008 | Permalink | 
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Opt Out of Google Street View?
The guys over at Google Sightseeing noticed that the Google Streetview camera in Fairbanks, Alaska apparently got covered over with plastic bags, obscuring some of the images that were shot.
This led to speculation that some enterprising residents had perhaps purposefully obscured the cameras out of privacy concerns - though, that seems moderately unlikely to me since I doubt most people know what the car even is when it’s tooling around, shooting photos of places. (more…)
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/08/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Yahoo Collaborates With McAfee To Secure Search Results
It was announced this week that Yahoo! and McAfee are teaming up to help fight malware. Yahoo’s Search team will take McAfee information on malicious sites and use that to filter those sites out of their search results. In addition, McAfee can take some data from Yahoo’s search results to help them identify more malicious domains. (more…)
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/07/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Will Geolocation Become Ubiquitous?
Chris Messina at Citizen Agency has just blogged about how he believes that geolocation data will become ubiquitous for websites to use, and this sort of contextual information about users will form a new layer of information that will available to all internet applications.
I find myself a bit skeptical, just because geolocation data has been around for so long now, and I’ve heard people saying that it will revolutionize how information is presented to us for quite some time. This concept is nothing new, though if you look at it from the perspective that Messina has provided, it’s a fairly compelling-feeling twist as a sort of infrastructure given that could and should be incorporated in the planning and development of any given internet site — particularly social ones — at their very inception.
What isn’t plain is just how integral all the locative information could be, considering the issues of unknowable error rates involved in geolocation data (see the section on “The issue of error rates” in “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space And Key To Click-Fraud Detection“) and consumer interest group resistance to pinpointing of users’ locations based upon privacy concerns (just today there was an article on how groups are complaining to the FTC about the ease of geo-pinpointing of users of mobile devices). I wish he’d touched on those aspects in some way, although I do like the techno-evangelist spin he’s provided on location as a foundational aspect in site design.
Update: Susan Mernit, formerly of Yahoo!, also points out that security is a major concern for applications like dating sites, and that there’s consumer irritation involved with some contextual advertising.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/06/2008 | Permalink | Email
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New Ranking Methodology for Google Image Search
The New York Times is reporting on a new research paper about Google’s new image ranking algo which apparently associates an inferred linking relationship between images and uses the PageRank method of iterating ranking values across the graph to come up with final ranking values. This “VisualRank” method was presented in a paper at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing this past Thursday, and the process was also reported at Techcrunch.
Google’s advancements in Image Search
could help keep high-value image results
like this coastal pic stay high in the SERPs
for apropos keywords, while making less-
important images rank far lower.
The new methodology is apparently very adept at weeding out less-important and less-useful images from the search results.
I have earlier reported on Google’s research into Supervised Multiclass Labeling (”SML”) which can assist with associating keywords with the actual content found within digital images. See also Search Engine Land’s article on Google’s VisualRank Paper.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Digital Graffiti Goes Mainstream: TIME Magazine Article
I noticed that TIME covered the laser graffiti artists of the Graffiti Research Lab this week. Nearly a year ago, I covered the phenomenon of guerrilla marketing via laser light images “drawn” on the sides of buildings at night.
Having this covered in a mainstream rag like TIME is probably nearly enough to make the concept jump the shark, and the novelty element and guerrilla marketing value could be virtually annihilated by familiarity.
I’m not really complaining so much as noting the effect — and noting that the promotion value of the medium could become rapidly eroded when it’s too common. The novelty and amusement factor could give way to annoyance if laser displayed images on buildings became frequent. When a methodology hits mainstream, it’s no longer “guerrilla”. 
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/15/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Travel Searches, Local & More Searches Turning Case-Sensitive in Google SERPs
Some of us at Netconcepts have been noticing that keyword rankings in Google search engine results pages (”SERPs”) have been turning case-sensitive for some queries lately. Search Engine Roundtable highlighted that the case sensitivity issue had been reported for queries seen in the UK, but we’ve been seeing it for queries committed from the US as well.
For instance, search for something like “fossil watches” and compare with “Fossil Watches”, and you’ll see that a few of the listings in the SERPs trade ranking positions:
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/15/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Google Maps Now Allows Custom Categories For Businesses
Search Engine Roundtable notes that the Google Local Business Center is allowing businesses to enter their own, custom categories. While this new functionality has been around for a few weeks now, it is an important one and addresses a major need that both Mike Blumenthal and I have highlighted previously — I recently spoke about this issue again at the SMX West session on Local Search & Blended Results. Previously, businesses could only select business categories from an unusually short list of categories. Exacerbating the issue, some businesses achieved other category associations outside of Google’s sharply limited taxonomy when their listings found in other yellow pages providers such as Superpages were absorbed into Google Maps, including the more comprehensive categories found in those other content sources.
Under the new functionality, businesses may type in custom business categories, and the interface also provides helpful potential term using the Google Suggestion Tool:
Free-form categories is a slightly unique way to address the need of businesses. Yellow pages companies have traditionally offered businesses the option of categorization under many thousands of unique categories — on the order of twelve thousand to fifteen thousand categories in some cases. However, YP companies have also carefully considered and turned down requests for additions of completely new categories in some cases, mainly due to how yellow pages are constructed — if there are too few businesses in a category it won’t make monetary sense to add it into a directory. And, if the category name is too esoteric, consumers won’t search for it anyway.
With Google’s local search operating more closely as a straight keyword search tool, businesses could associate categories with themselves that are as specific as they desire without affecting usability or cost.
In other, related news, Google has announced that YouTube videos are now integrated with Google Maps, allowing businesses to add video info to their listings.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/15/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Where’s Waldo in Google Earth
In a very clever bit of marketing, Canadian artist Melanie Coles has created a large rooftop image of the iconic character found in the popular Where’s Waldo? book series.
The image is located somewhere in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was created with the specific intention of being findable via Google Earth (warning, I have the location pinpointed in a link and geocoordinates at the end of this post). It will be a while before Waldo can be found in Google Earth (or in Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or MS Live Search Maps, for that matter), because there is a time lag in between when satellite images and aerial photos get updated in those services — so, it could be six months to a year before the image is really findable and viewable online.
The image was created as a demonstration of a viral game for Coles’ graduation art project at the Emily Carr Institute. Her blog statement on the project says:
Popularity: 17% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/14/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Google’s KML Becomes Industry Standard
In an example of how becoming top dog can empower a company to influence and set industry-wide protocols, Google Earth’s KML format has been declared an open standard for geographical data by the Open Geospatial Consortium (”OGC”).
It’s really great and progressive that such a large, publicly-traded company such as Google would release control of its considerable intellectual property rights and allow KML to be used by anyone.
Google’s LatLong Blog also crows a bit about how KML is “the HTML of geographic content”, and explains that KML is no longer owned by Google, but is now administrated by the OGC.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/14/2008 | Permalink | Email
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