Google's Manber: Learn to think like machines

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 18

Google’s engineering VP Udi Manber tells Popular Mechanics that people should work harder to express themselves in terms that a machine will grasp. (ex Marketing Pilgrim)

He says: “I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them…”

The point is that much of our social life, not to mention our shopping and work, will hinge on how well we optimize ourselves for machines. This means finding and being findable, and being accurately tagged. It boils down to honing our own algorithms (even though the computers will handle the math). I write about this in my book…

One more tidbit. Last year, Manber says, the Google team made some 450 “improvements” to the search algorithm. How much of this was to improve? And how much of it was to evade the SEO crowd that by gaming the system was doing exactly what Manber prescribes—engineering to be found—but doing it too well?

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Reader Comments

Mark Jackson

April 18, 2008 11:39 AM

Not to self promote, but this sounds a little like a recent column that I published for searchenginewatch.com (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628861).

I mention that this seems to be somewhat evolutionary. Search engines are trying to become more human-like and search engine optimizers are becoming more like machines.

There are so many companies and individuals who overthink the process of optimizing their websites for the search engines. If they think of something that they're more familiar with (human behavior) they would understand that search engines rank websites the way that we might choose a friend.

What is your history? What kind of substance do you have? Who are your friends? How many friends do you have?

How old is your domain? How many pages of quality content exist on your website? Who is linking to you? How many websites are linking to you?

Mark

President/CEO, Vizion Interactive (www.vizioninteractive.com)

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In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

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