Zoom in this Theme: The LSI Myth

Few days ago, Michael Duz had a great post, The LSI Myth wherein he describes the nonsense promoted by snakeoil SEO marketers. He has a list of common taglines used by these people:

Intelligent Extraction of Information

Interested in Intelligent Extraction from Graphs and High Dimensional Data? Then, watch videos or read papers from IPAM’s Graduate Summer School: Intelligent Extraction of Information from Graphs and High Dimensional Data from July 11 – 29, 2005.

Thesis: A Hybrid Knowledge-based/Content-based Recommender

Here are some great news:

1. I am getting ready for my presentation at the Intektel International Conference and Expo. I am presenting the second day of the conference on “The Impact of Search Engines in the Internet”.

2. Next week we have the ARIN Conference (American Registry of Internet Numbers) in Puerto Rico, and in June we have also in San Juan, PR the 29th ICANN Conference. WOW!

3. Taschuk Morgan has written an excellent Honour Thesis in which kindly references our tutorial on Cosine Similarity and Term Weights. Morgan writes:

Thesis: Understanding LSI via the Term-Term Truncated Matrix

As we mentioned in IR Watch – The Newsletter (got a free subscription?), although LSI (LSA) itself is not first-order co-occurrence (see Prof. Tom Landauer: Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis), a recent thesis from Regis Newo shows that high-order co-occurrence might be at the heart of LSI and is what makes the technique works. This 2005 thesis abstract on Understanding LSI via the Truncated Term-Term Matrix states:

Thesis: Information Retrieval with Genetic Programming

Here is the 2002 master thesis of Nir Oren, University of the Witwatersand, Johannnesburg:

Improving the effectiveness of information retrieval with genetic programming

where he proposes an interesting approach to IR using genetic algorithms. Part of his abstract states:

Thesis: A Language-Based Approach to Categorical Analysis

I am finishing reading the 2001 Master Thesis of Cameron Alexander Marlow, from MIT:
A Language-Based Approach to Categorical Analysis

where he proposed the use of Synchronic Imprints (SI) combined with LSI. Great thesis. Essentially, SI incorporates a spring model in which term frequencies are inversely proportional to their distances.

Keyword Density Myth – The Devil’s Advocate

Those that promote keyword density (KW) myths are now claiming that search engines use KW as an inexpensive spam detection mechanism; i.e.,

if (KW = fij/lj > upper threshold value) {// raise the spam red flag }

IR Watch – The Newsletter

The goal of IR Watch – The Newsletter is to disseminate recent advances, research, and news from the information retrieval world. The current issue (IRW-2007-5) is a summary of my presentation at the OJOBuscador Congress 2 (March 8, 9 – Madrid, Spain),

Demystifying LSI for SEOs.

Keyword Density (KD): Revisiting an SEO Myth

Back in March of 2005 I wrote The Keyword Density of Non Sense article for Mike Grehan’s newsletter. An expanded and improved version was also published at Mi Islita.com. After these articles, many SEOs saw the light.

However, in an attempt at perpetuating KD myths, few SEOs tried to reformulate the alleged importance or usefulness of keyword density by presenting KD as a spam detection filter used by search engines. Good try, but this still is non sense and another SEO myth.

SEOs Blogging LSI Non Sense

At this SEOMoz.org blog, posters are discussing about search engines semantic capabilities, including LSI.

I stopped by to clarify several things since many of these present their hearsay as valid statements.