How Topics Affect Everyone and Everything

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Today’s Agenda

• Why our brains need trusted groups to help make good decisions

• Why Computers need trusted groups to be effective search engines

• How Search Engines can analyze people and pages and categorize anything and everything on the web

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The BIG specialist search engine

Twitter has 500,000,000 Tweets per day on average

In the same day, Majestic crawls over 3,000,000,000 NEW URLs (and sees 7 billion)

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How We Make Decisions

Suggested Reading: “The Chimp Paradox”, Peters. & “Hooked”, Nir.

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Why Trust Search Engines?

A Friend’s Motivation•To not let their friend down by giving an untrustworthy recommendation•To “Look good” in their friend’s eyes

•To be Altruistic in their suggestions.

The Engine’s Motivation•Site Owners want to sell you something•Search Engines want you to click on an advert OR•Search Engines want you to see results that will make you come back next time.

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So why do we use a search engine?

Logic / ReasonLogic / Reason

Impulse / EmotionImpulse / Emotion

• Instant Gratification• We won’t be embarrassed• Our logical brain thinks slowly

• Instant Gratification• We won’t be embarrassed• Our logical brain thinks slowly

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So why do we Trust a Search Engine?

Logic / ReasonLogic / Reason

Impulse / EmotionImpulse / Emotion

• It is Often Right & Still Quicker• We Developed a Habit• Engines (L)earnt our Trust

• It is Often Right & Still Quicker• We Developed a Habit• Engines (L)earnt our Trust

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How do they do that?

• Information Retrieval in the “Zeta” age

1.Data Collection2.Data Grouping3.Data Indexing4.Data Matching

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Groups Make Search Much Better

• Find a Fact• Find a Friend• Find a Customer• Finding Anything Li

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Research At: info.majestic.com/groupresearch

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Why Categorize the Web?

• Categorizing into topics prevents spam:

• http://maj.to/1yZOdW5 (TrustRank Paper)http://maj.to/1Bb1lHu (Stanford Paper)

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Categorisation by data type

• Country IP/TLD• Image Search• Video Search• Local Listings• Maps• Travel

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Approaches to defining topics

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Approaches to defining topics

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How we categorize the web

• Content connects in Groups

• Keywords gravitate into Groups

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We see AND ANALYZE links

Topical Trust Flow using decay Algorithm

???

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Works best with Universal Data set

• Every signal is small• Individually prone to

error or opinion• At scale the error

decreases• Confidence increases

http://info.majestic.com/universal

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Convert a score to an easy number

Example: Bing.com

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Topical Trust Flow is Very Powerful

• More granular than (say) PageRank

• Updates continually• Provides measurable context and influence at scale• Page level AND site level tracking• 800 topics

• Can compare all types of online data (People, Pages, Sites, Images, Plugins)

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Use Cases

• Already used in Search

• Finding Influencers• Credit checking• Comparing different media channels• Link building

• Company evaluations

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Use Case: Search Engines

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Who is more popular on Twitter?

Use case: Finding influencers

Lady Gaga? Barack Obama?

Trust Flow

74Trust Flow

70

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Jon M. Kleinberg, Cornell University 1999

HubHub

HubHub

HubHub

AuthorityAuthority

AuthorityAuthority

AuthorityAuthority

AuthorityAuthority

AuthorityAuthorityAuthorityAuthority

AuthorityAuthority AuthorityAuthorityAuthorityAuthority

In Penguin, Google Muted the Hubs!

Knowledge Graph

Knowledge Graph

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The Fork in the Road for SEOs

Authority Linking:

Start measuring the power of every page

Vs

Chase the entity, over the link

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At Last Some new(er) research

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Now we see Google define Authority

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Wikidata is the new Freebase

• Wikipedia Articles create entities

• Entities point to other entities• Entities point to each other to create

Relationships

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Some Takeaways• Ideas connect in groups. Gaining Trust within that group is

the key to success.• Topics help Google to connect entities (Majestic interprets

those connections)• Your Web Page / Site MAY be an Entity, but is probably part

of larger collections of objects about Topics• The more entities cite you as a topic authority, the more

relevant you are for that topic• If it isn’t connected to defined entities, it isn’t connected

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Trust stems from Authority defined at the Entity Level!

Links generate Trust and are about Relationships. Action Point if you want to do “SEO”

Get the most famous person in the topic to cite you– Or or otherwise make a noise– Or become connected to the authority– Or best be the authority. Be famous for something!

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Be famous for something!