Just about the first thing you’re going to do when you learn MapReduce is do the word frequency job. That just reads in a bunch of text and reports on how many times each word is used. The mapper spits out a map of “word” and “1″, and the reducer adds each number associated with [...]

In a previous post, we looked at the first two components of the success of search: the density of highlighted search terms and the placement within the search engine results page. However, there are times when the science of a search engine does not match the art of marketing. It is the role of a [...]

When a user enters in a search query and is taken to a search engine results page, then the probability of clicking on a result is a function of three items: The density of the searched for terms found in the search snippet. Ideally, these are somehow highlighted – a different color, italics, bolding – [...]

Unless you have a very well-known brand where people type your URL to visit your site, then chances are that most of your traffic comes from an external search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. A quick analysis can tell you that, relative to the total number of keywords visitors use to get to [...]