The Coiner of the Phrase: "80/20 Rule" Died

Joseph Juran, 103, Pioneer in Quality Control, Dies

It's funny how often I've said, or heard, the phrase "80/20" and only now realize that the Pareto Principle was coined popularized by Joseph M. Juran. Pareto, I've just learned, was a Classical Liberal Economist of the 19th C who made the observation that twenty percent of the population owned eighty percent of the property and this truism held across time and culture.

80% of a company's profits come from 20% of their customers

80% of their complaints come from 20% of their customers

80% of crimes come from 20% of the criminals

and

80% of users use only 20% of the features

20% of software bugs create 80% of the errors

The 80/20 rule may or may not be another "Golden Ratio" myth but it has certainly entered the lexicon.

The Privacy Paradox

Forbes has an interesting article regarding privacy.

"Consumers express a lot of concern about their privacy online in surveys. At the same time, very few engage in privacy-protecting activities," says Leslie Harris, executive director of the privacy advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology. "There's a real inconsistency."

...

So, do users value the convenience of having a search bar beside their e-mail more than protecting their sensitive information? "There's a growing market pressure to do right by privacy," insists Harris. "But do I think the market alone will fix this? No. At the end of the day, we still need legal protection." Part of the solution, she says, may be a national privacy law.
The Privacy Paradox

I agree - part of the solution may be privacy laws. Facebook ought to have no more say over your data than does the journal in which you jot down notes.

Another Way to Save Articles

I just found out about a new web application - Instapaper that seems wonderful. Marco Arment, the lead developer, describes the project in the following way:

You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.

You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.
Tech Crunch

This is perfect for someone like me. My bookmarks are completely out of hand; I often scrape articles I want to read and when I most want to read them I am away from my computer.

My only fear is quickly bumping up against storage limits (both in space and time span). Here's hoping this site takes off.

Which Meta Tags Will Get My Site Rated Higher?

Fortunately or unfortunately there are no major META tags that will help your site be ranked higher. Anybody that says so is trying to sell you something.

Several years ago there were two META tags whose expressed purpose was to help you describe your site.

<meta name="description" content="Place Description Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Place Keywords Here" />

Developers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) quickly started to take advantage of the tags. One of the more eggregious ways that people took advantage of these tags was by putting highly ranked search terms in the tags even though those terms had nothing whatsoever to do with the site in question.

The logic behind this was that people would find and see the site even though it had nothing to do with what the people were searching for. This may or may not have been effective for the sites who were abusing the system but it annoyed people who were using the search engines. It also annoyed the decision makers at Google and other search engines. The result was that these two meta tags became deprecated: search engines no longer valued the information in these tags.

Once again, anybody who says there are meta-tags that will help your site be rated highly is -- at best -- many years out of date.

Is there anything you can do to get your site ranked higher? Yes, there are many things that can be done but none of them include META tags.

If You are Into Geeky Humor:

This guy has some great comics: xkcd. It's worth going through the archives.

SERP: user selection of results

Q: How will the users choose among the search results?

Jakob Nielsen: From the user perspective … the top one [result] is going to be the one that ... they ..will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

A shame, but true. Very few people go through the search engine results scanning for other titles. Look at users browsing through music stores or book stores. They are quite willing to keep looking past the first few titles. There is not the same engagement in web searching. What is the reason for that? Is it the tactile sensation of picking up a CD or book? And how is that going to change when all music is downloaded from the web and book go the way of vinyl?

How do we bring that tactile response, that love to accumulate and touch to the web screen? I wonder how much using a mouse instead of a touch screen changes things? And to what extent are we impeded by the low resolution screens? Higher resolution screens would allow us to put a lot more secondary information on a screen, perhaps enticing users to keep searching – because the search would be much more interesting than simply reading a few characters of text.

SERP: more relevant display

Q: What changes will there be in search results pages over the next 3 years?

Jakob Nielsen: The big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

This is one place where SE need to make drastic changes. I don't see any indication of things happening quickly but this is one of the current technology's weak spots.

As mentioned in the article columnar presentation of search results may improve the situation. Users will continue to scan results, with the majority of users giving higher relevance to top ranked returns, BUT if paid searches and content aggregated sites such as Wikipedia can be sorted out from other returns it would be a useful incremental change.

Will Google make such a change? Only if they see a ROI. Until a competitor forces them to do so I doubt we will see much of a change in the short run.