I wouldn’t call the effort to do so a “miserable failure” , just that it must be difficult. More power to delicious for working through the spam bookmarks.

I look forward to reading/workng my way through the entirety of links/articles.

Sorry. I have corrected the article. Didn’t intend to minimize the efforts of others or aggrandize yours .

Thanks for the article and taking the time to respond.

Earlpearl: my point about anchors was only the one that Ed Chi agreed with–that good-faith anchors are created by others to point to a link and thus have a social nature. For whatever reason, people seem to forget that there more to social signals on the web than “social media” sites. Regarding the rest of your question: I’m not at liberty to discuss which signals Google uses or how it uses them. But obviously any signal that is useful when created in good faith becomes a candidate for being used in bad faith to manipulate ranking.

One question, Daniel: With regard to your blog post and article http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/12/27/faceted-web-search/

why would you have included “anchor text” as a question to Ed Chi, re “social signals”? Google may put a heavy dependance on “anchor text” as a signal, but likewise SEO’s are aware of it, and it seems SEO’s can overwhelm any natural usage of it. Instead of a “social signal” within Google it becomes a signal to successfully manipulate.

This SEO forum thread from 2004 to 2006 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=256

With rankings and daily testings of rankings and other key data showed how effective SEO’s can be by manipulating rankings via the usage of anchor text.

Google has adjusted its weight, changed it, etc…..but Daniel, when you inquire about “anchor text” I wonder how you see it as a “social signal” versus a tool for manipulating google’s rankings and more specifically how you would view its weight amongst signals in determining the importance of rankings for search queries.

Meanwhile as you reference the difficulties in applying faceted search and the various approaches by different search engines and others, it reminds me of one of my favorite tools supplied by the engines to ascertain user meaning…for those that develop websites and are also looking to understand user intent:

Microsoft offers a set of tools at its adlabs: http://adlab.msn.com/ . Great stuff for the end website developer. When addressing a new topic I like to go to it to refine targeted keywords and keyword phrases. I appreciate the assistance and guidance from these guys toward narrowing the focus on user intent.

If the users with appropriate intent can get to my sites with their services and products, and I can appear before these specific users, I actually have a shot at converting a few of them.

Look forward to more commentary from Daniel.

I too enjoyed the paper, although I ended wishing for more….

Thanks, I fixed the link. That was my formatting error.

And thank you Mike for inviting Daniel to participate.

The paper “Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my!” was one of my favorites from 2009 as well. It was interesting to see some actual information on how people search using different types of devices.

The link to your chapter on faceted search is broken above – it should point to: http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/09/25/free-chapter-on-faceted-search-user-interface-design/