Comments on: LSI Blog Posts and SEOs

By: Finding Topic-Specific Posts « IR Thoughts

Finding Topic-Specific Posts « IR Thoughts — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:45:59 +0000

[...] http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/a-call-to-seos-claiming-to-sell-lsi/ http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/lsi-blog-posts-and-seos/ http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2007/06/02/when-seos-are-caught-in-lies/ [...]

By: Subsumptions vs Synonyms - Conceptual Indexing Revisited « IR Thoughts

Subsumptions vs Synonyms - Conceptual Indexing Revisited « IR Thoughts — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:04:23 +0000

[...] is still relevant these days wherein many SEOs make incorrect claims about how search engines use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and wherein others are paying attention to synonymy and phrase processing patents. This post is [...]

By: E. Garcia

E. Garcia — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:55:27 +0000

Good catch triplah!
From http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/06/smx-notes-you-a-with-matt-cutts.html, this regarding an SMX conference:
Matt Cutts sat down with Danny Sullivan and the SMX Advanced attendees for a Q&A session. At one point the following surfaced:
“Q: What’s your progress on LSI and should you theme a website or will it dilute your rank?”
“A: We neither confirm nor deny that we use this. You try it and see.”
“Also: Google does a lot of work behind the scenes to do good semantic matching. We know bio = biography, but apple doesn’t = apples. The ~ is for synonym search. We try to do it “under the hood” to bring better results.”
While the first part is not an answer (just a yes-no), the second states how Google uses the tilde operator.
As we stated long ago the tilde operator is a synonym search thing designed to find similar or related terms.
If I have a search engine I can use the string (or any string) to invoke a lookup list of terms and then to these map documents. I can make the entire process transparent to end-users. I can also provide a visual representation of this using nodes and arcs (a graph). I can even use this to expand in the background an answer set and incorrectly call that “concept expansion” or “topic expansion”
This does not mean that I’m using LSI.
In fact, my approach is far different from LSI.
In LSI there are no query operators, neither is a synonym search technique.
It appears SEOs are still quoting early and outdated LSI papers wherein the role of co-occurrence was not clearly understood.
Let’s hope that one day SEOs learn how SVD works so they can realize the limitations of LSI and how it is used. Maybe my hope is just a dream.

By: triplah

triplah — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 06:42:04 +0000

The most depressing thing about the searchen link is that I found it on the wikipedia page for LSA, i promptly edited it out, not sure how it managed to get on there (actually i’m pretty sure i know how, but no sense in pointing fingers).

By: E. Garcia

E. Garcia — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:50:42 +0000

I received email from Bill Slawski wherein he clarifies to me what he meant. I must admit that I misunderstood to a certain point what he meant. I have no problem apologizing to you, Bill.

For the rest above, I stand by every single letter. Those are not accusations, those are the facts.