Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

An article by Matt Kain published in today’s iMedia Connection is both intriguing and scary – if you’re in the search engine optimization business.  According to Kain:

“What if you could deliver search results based not on exactly matching words or phrases, but instead on context and relevance? What if the right site were delivered to the right user, even if he or she misspelled a word, or didn't even pick the right keyword or phrase? The big brains out there are asking: 'Why do we need keywords at all?' If we used what the linguists call 'natural language,' we'd ask a question in simple (or even complex) terms, and not have to get obsessive about guessing the right code. Search engines would 'get it,' even though you didn't guess how an SEO genius might have guessed what you would probably type when you were looking for, let's say, preventable childhood diseases.”

Kain goes on to discuss a statistical technique (Latent Semantic Indexing) that compares “the relationship between words and passages of text in order to evaluate the quality of the content [it also helps search engines] to arrive at context and meaning, without a one-to-one match.”

Kain discusses one way this new technique might help online health searchers.  Instead of organizations like the CDC having to produce HTML code (or text) that contains key terms and many of their possible variations, LSI would simply hone in on the appropriate content without CDC having to do any SEO.  

This is a powerful concept that could significantly improve the ability of search engines to deliver relevant content and help stop spammers (who crowd their copy with key words in order to attract unwitting visitors).  While this LSI might scare the SEO folks (and spammers), it could be a boon to everyone else.  After all, if isn’t a search engine supposed to provide you with relevant content – whether or not you type in a specific keyword?

Very intriguing.