Netflix is offering a prize of $1,000,000 to whomever can increase the productivity of their Cinematch system by 10%. Cinematch groups movies into “clusters” drawn on ratings provided by Netflix users. Based upon an algorithm designed by a now Google employee, the system bears a resemblance to the Google algorithm which groups websites into similar neighborhoods connected by links. Another internet contest, Globalwarming awareness2007, is also offering a prize in what is billed as the “SEO World Championship”. Instead of bombarding the internet with movie recommendations, the internet is being bombarded with websites around the topic of globalwarming awareness in 2007.

Time to dust off the dirt on your URLs. When writing content, replication is something you should try to avoid. When you have hundreds of pages, its difficult to make every page unique.

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Especially if you have an ecommerce site where pages also look very similar to other merchant sites with the same products. Other merchants tend to use the same descriptions provided by vendors. Different URLS with Similar Text or DUST is the new buzzword. We’ve been checking out some abstracts and white papers to help bury this problem.

US Patent 6,658,423

DUST

Marketing used to be easy. Its primary force was television and it had a captive audience of millions. As cable television grew, the market began to fracture into smaller pieces and marketers had to go hunting for their audience. Technology progressed to create a multitude of advertising options including the internet, video games, and satellite tv/radio. Marketers had to get creative to stand out from the crowd by getting really creative and use whatever venue that they could stick an ad on and seep it into your subconscious.
Today we see ads in parking spaces, in the bathrooms, shopping carts, store floors, just about everywhere you look. Tuning out ads is now a force of habit and it is less often that an ad cuts through the clutter and catches our eye.
The internet has made marketing easy again. Internet users are a captive audience since they are engaged in an attempt to express themselves in two or three words that will take them to a web page destination. With simple keyphrases entered into a search engine, they browse through a list of web pages that have cut through the clutter to deliver desired search results. No longer passive, consumers can now use the internet to find what they are looking for.