Скачать или смотреть NLP for SEO (1 of 8) : What search engines are, where they came from, and how they work

In this introduction to the seminar, we discuss what exactly search engines are, the general principles that describe how they work "under the hood", and what role they play in the web as a whole. We go through a brief history of the Internet, and explore how search engines evolved over time from simple hand-curated text files into the all-encompassing almost-magic intelligent-seeming engines we use today. We discuss Google's development of the PageRank algorithm, and how it resulted in them dominating the search engine market.

Before we close, we show a small NLP-driven "toy" app that we wrote to demonstrate some cool things you can do with just a little bit of Natural Language Processing technology.

---

SEO can be seen as a three-way arms race between:
1. Search engine providers such as Google
2. Content-rich sites that contain the information that users are searching for, and that the search engine wants to send the user to
3. Spam sites that mostly contain garbage, but that disguise themselves as content-rich

Spam sites use black-hat SEO techniques to trick the search engine into mistaking them for the latter. Content-rich sites (such as yours, of course!) use white-hat SEO to convince the search engine that they AREN'T spam. And search engines continuously revise their algorithms to do a better job of differentiating one from the other.

Modern search engines have begun to deploy sophisticated Natural Language Processing techniques as a chief component of their arsenal in this battle. Learn what these NLP techniques are, how they're used by search engines, and how you can tailor the content of your site to be NLP-friendly so that Google knows you're one of the "good guys".

Lecture series delivered to Wizard Academy in Austin, TX in Feb 2019 by Mikhail Voloshin and Cedric Yau of Linebacker Data.

This series is intended for an audience of curious laypersons. No specific technical knowledge is required for the comprehension of its contents.