[Esip-discovery] time for new challenges?

[Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102)]

On Dec 19, 2012, at 10:35 PM, "Mattmann, Chris A (388J)" <chris.a.mattmann at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

> Yep, this is the classic difference between "vertical" (specialized) and
> "horizontal" (general) search engines. This is why e.g., Fandango has its
> own *way* better search for movies, than e.g., Google would for the same.

However, newbie data users don't know to go to the vertical search engine in the first place.  The bottom line, therefore is this:

How can I make my web application / portal show up in the first page of a Google or Bing search, assuming a minimum amount of user pre-knowledge and using fairly general words like "rainfall", "snow", etc.  (i.e., without specific acronyms).

That said, I think Pedro and Ruth may be onto something with the ideas of datacasting (to increase the static universe of pages likely to be indexed and thus more chance of coming up top in the hits) and rich OpenSearch responses (which again, may be simply static datacasts as well.

(As a side note:  I'm also happy to report that this discussion has made me realize how we can provide a fully open API to Giovanni as a service. Which now seems so blindingly obvious, I just want to say "Duh".)

Anyway, we are going to talk Grand Challenges at ESIP, so I would like to put this out there as a possibility.  Also, keeping in mind that as good as the suggestions in this discussion are, I would be interested in seeing how we might obtain numerical evidence as to how well they work in real life with Google and Bing.

> 
> FYI my class at USC (CSCI 572) on Information Retrieval and Search Engines:
> 
> http://sunset.usc.edu/classes/cs572_2011/
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris
> 
> On 12/19/12 10:41 AM, "Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102)"
> <christopher.s.lynnes at nasa.gov> wrote:
> 
>> On Dec 19, 2012, at 12:13 PM, jeff mcwhirter wrote:
>> 
>>> On 12/19/12 9:52 AM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> SEO is an extremely difficult problem, couched in Information Retrieval
>>>> Research/theory. Most advances are wholly incremental or point
>>>> solutions
>>>> that aren't widespread as of yet.  Most of that has to do with the
>>>> search
>>>> engine companies guarding their intimate optimizations and ranking
>>>> secrets
>>>> very closely.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> I don't think it is really an issue of traditional search engine
>>> optimization but rather that there often isn't a crawable site.  It
>>> seems like most repositories are search oriented and what pages are
>>> there don't have much in the way of text corpus to index.   If the
>>> pages 
>>> and the text aren't there Google isn't going to index it.
>>> 
>>> -Jeff
>>> 
>> 
>> Yes, this is a problem, esp. as we go to more AJAX-populated content to
>> provide a better UX for the users.
>> 
>> Another issue is that general-purpose portals/applications have
>> difficulty "competing" with more specialized sites. "Rainfall" may show
>> up once in a description for a general purpose application, but a weather
>> site, for example, is all "rainfall" this and "rainfall" that.
>> --
>> Dr. Christopher Lynnes     NASA/GSFC, Code 610.2    phone: 301-614-5185
>> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when
>> there is nothing left to take away" -- A. de Saint-Exupery
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 

--
Dr. Christopher Lynnes, NASA/GSFC, ph: 301-614-5185