Blogger's Secret

Using Google search to remember what you wrote

Once you have been at the writing process for a while, you'll have collected more words than you remember in detail. From time to time it's helpful to go back to them. Here's a few suggestions for Google search queries that will unearth your old gems.

1. If your name or nickname is sufficiently distinctive, and if you've been using it routinely to sign your work, then you can simply search for your name plus search terms to get what you want.  For instance

vielmetti foia

unearths a sample of writings I've done on the Freedom of Inforamtion Act. Now, as it turns out, this is not a perfect search because I have a cousin Bruce Vielmetti who writes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and will from time to time come up with a related article from him.

2. To reduce your search to a single web site which you've been writing for, search as follows

site:vielmetti.typepad.com blueberries

This will return all of the pages on a single site related to the search terms in question.

3. Most people have forgotted about it, but Google has a special search engine for weblogs, Google Blog Search. If you look for your own stuff here using the similar techniques as above, you'll also find people who have quoted you in their blogs, or even the occasional case of a rogue site that has scraped all of your words and put them on their site.

It's important to be able to retrieve your old words once you have flung them out into the void. You may want to refer back to when you had a really good idea, or there may be something that was published once that was not your best work that you want to find again and repair or remove. Make sure you have some grasp of the powerful tools at hand for remembering what you once knew enough about to write down.

Human being optimization, not search engine optimization

The history of writing weblogs includes a time when the search engines absolutely loved content provided in blog format, far more than than those words ever deserved to be considered authoritative or relevant for the topic at hand. A scrap of tech news would appear, and then a legion of tech bloggers would each rewrite that morsel into their own words and link among themselves with bits of quickly formed commentary filling out the bulk. The practice of aggregation - lifting most of someone else's work and publishing it under your name, poorly credited - only added to the excitement.

Search engines change over time, and my sense is that blogs don't get anywhere near the primary attraction from search than they once did. If you are working on building up a body of work, it's better to optimize your writing for human beings than it is to write strictly for search. While you are still going to use tools that make it straightforward for search engines to find you, it's much more likely that you'll get loyal readership from people who will find what you are writing through networks of people.

My experience with looking at the analytics of traffic coming from search on several blogs that I run is that people who appear from search rarely stick around very long and often don't come back. If you want to get regular readership, write for the readers, not for the search engines.

Reading your search logs to sharpen your sense of relevance

Here's a couple of short paragraphs on why reading your search logs makes sense to do every once in a while.

If you have been blogging long enough, you'll have content that is relevant every year.  (For me, it tends to be the articles about blueberries and morels).  A careful look at your log files will tell you when the early searches are starting to happen for this season's efforts, so you can start writing the article that will be popular in 60 to 90 days.  People with monthly magazines know this as the "editorial calendar", and by reading log files you can get a heads up on how this cycle behaves within a year or two of effort.

If you already are an expert at some level, reading the referrer logs for your posts will help you figure out where people are linking to and referring to you.  Pay careful note to the traffic from wikis; these will signal places where there is a link to you that you are in a spot to improve by editing it yourself. 

Every once in a while (and this is the most fun) someone will search for something and you will have no idea why they landed on your pages for that interesting query.  Whatever word salad you have on your pages is near the top for that search, and you have an opportunity to learn from that happy accident.  I ended up with a whole interesting series on "Michigan spiders" from that accidental set of searches that turned into an opportunity to find all of the amateur entomologists with blogs in the state.

The level of log analysis you want for this is casual, not detailed - just go in every so often at take a look at a sample of recent traffic.  You don't need to use it for anything more than ideas and tips for new blog topics or a sense for how old blog topics can be improved.

Searching delicious - finding experts, enthusiasts and key words

Part of the Blogger's Search series, the first in that series.

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool.  It was developed by Josh Schacter and now is owned by Yahoo.  On a typical Wednesday morning (Eastern Time) people are collectively bookmarking about 300 pages per minute.  My own delicious collection is more than 10000 pages collected over almost 5 years, which puts me at some extreme edge of that network's user population.

To illustrate the applicability of delicious to the problem of searching for an expert, let me introduce you to several paths towards locating experts, enthusiasts, and key words to help you dig deeper into a subject using delicious as your first search engine before Google.

Expert location

Let's think that you are searching for information about restaurants in Montreal, and want to find someone who has expertise.  A simple approach is to do a delicious tag combination and search for both tags simultaneously as montreal+restauarant and see what the stream of news is and who is writing and commenting.  Vary your word use (restaurant, restaurants) as needed to get a wider stream.  

Note that this gives you very, very different search results than a Google search for the same terms. Use this knowledge to refine your efforts; pick the first item from the Google list, bookmark it, and see who else has said what else about it.  The quick check from that list of related tags is that "food" is much more popular than "restaurant" and "restaurants" (60 vs 40 or so) and so that's a next iteration for exploration of terms; any of the people who bookmarked this page are worth exploring further their tag streams to see what else they know or follow.

Enthusiast location

One typical characteristic of an enthusiastic user of delicious is that they will have many, many pages bookmarked using the same tag.  If you go to someone's user page and they have 70, 100, or 150 different pages bookmarked with a single tag, chances are good that they are have some core expertise within that tag.

We'll take as our example a search for someone who has lot of interest in Orlando.  Start on the list of popular Orlando pages ; there are only two of them, and one is the home page of the Orlando Sentinel. Look at the log of comments for that site and note the notes only page.  In reading the comments one sticks out, from uni84freak : "Best source for Orlando theme park news".  See their user page, and note that a top tag for them is Orlando with 24 bookmarks using that term; that's as good a start as any to explore one person's research.

Keyword research

This is not so much about finding the most popular terms, but rather identifying some very specific language and terms of art that experts use within a field.  You are looking to do tag surfing, going from one term to another and then to a third to triangulate in on some topic where you have general knowledge but not specific enough.  Here's a strategy:

Start with a term that you want to know more about: expert.  Note that the related terms (finance, opinion, money) are wrong for this effort, so we go to popular pages on the subject, and get this result for the top page.  That site's top tags are reference, search, information, howto and research - and we can move into each of those terms to narrow down what those are.

(more - still not complete - needs illustrations)

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This was posted when it was incomplete; that forced me to complete it.  this one is hard to do.  "triangulation" is the method I'm after but how to describe that without some graphs...

The Blogger's Search: look beyond page one of Google search results

One of the elements that you will explore as you develop your expertise on a topic is a repertoire of search engines and search strategies within those search engines that extends beyond the simple two word phrase typed into Google.

You are looking for a comprehensive approach to finding things that will unearth details that a casual net browser will not locate, and an insight into navigating through the clues found in unfamiliar networks that help you zero in on useful information.

I think this is best constructed as a part of a series, with details drawn from actual (or expected future) experience.  By the end of this series, I'll have described some search strategies using these systems:

• delicious and other social bookmarking tools
• Google Book Search and other full text book search tools
• patent databases
• Flickr and other photography collections
• Lexis/Nexis
• PubMed and science databases
• University networks
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• your library and its librarians

The best perspective on this does not say that any single one of these systems is the best for your particular field of expertise.  Rather, a comprehensive search over a long extended period will have an occasion to visit all of these resources over time, and by varying your field of vision and point of view in search you can get a much broader perspective on a topic.

Well, there's a dozen articles I need to start writing; look for these weekly appearing on Wednesdays.  Next up: search in delicious.