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Archives for August 2014

How Accurate is Google’s Answer Box?

You wouldn’t believe what I found on Google while searching for “gag gift meaning”.

There has been a paradigm shift in the way Google serves results to its users since the inclusion of Knowledge Graph in late 2012.

In 2013, Google started serving results within an Answer Box at the top, a  feature Google has been trying to improve further, hinting at a revolutionary change in the way we will experience Google Search moving forward. Basically, this also means Google is trying to offer a quick answer to searchers that don’t want to dig down deep.

In this exhaustive and informative slideshare, Dr. Pete from Moz has explained how Google Search has evolved since the early days.

 

Razvan Gavrilas from Cognitive SEO has written this post at length explaining dynamics behind Google’s Answer Box.

However, since Google has to address billions of queries on a daily basis, and it relies on various sources to fetches answers for its Answer Box, it might be possible that Google might go way off at times.

In this comprehensive test on the accuracy of Google’s Answer Box, Dan showed several cases where Google’s Answer Box was offering less-than-ideal results.

Recently, Dr. Pete at Moz, while answering a comment from a contributor, lamented how Google is scraping answers from other websites and showing them within the Answer Box.

“My opinion is this – Google has an unspoken agreement with webmasters, and it goes something like: “We’ll make money off of your content, but in return we’ll send you traffic.” That’s fair, in theory, and many of us have done well by it. Now, though, Google is making $60,000,000,000 off of that exchange, and they’re becoming more interested in how to protect/grow that number than honor the agreement. I think these scraped answer boxes are crossing a line, personally.”, he said.

How Reliable/Accurate is Google’s Answer Box?

While searching for “gag gift meaning” search query, I was surprised and disappointed at the same time, to find the following result: I got in touch with Dr. Pete over Twitter to see what his thoughts were on this, and he shared similar thoughts:

It seems like Google does have a lot of issues serving the right answer within the Answer Box. But if you consider the above example, it was downright funny. What are your thoughts on the Google’s Answer Box? Have you come across any egregious examples as such? Please, share them in the comment below!

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Does Medium iOS App Have Usability Issues?

Is Medium suffering from usability issues on handheld devices or just me?

Medium is a pretty popular blogging platform founded by Twitter co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

Launched in 2012, Medium has become extremely popular among bloggers looking for a decent blogging platform.  Although there are many other popular blogging platforms out there, Medium has carved a niche for itself by offering a clean interface aimed at improving user experience.

Even if you’re not into blogging, you’re likely to fall in love with this platform for the minimalistic layout and great stories shared by a variety of writers from different walks of life.

Like any other blogging platform, Medium too has apps tailored for iOS (no Android apps as yet).  However, they have limited features – you can’t write a story using their apps, for example.

Although I don’t use Medium as much for writing as for reading stories, the fact that they don’t mention it clearly in their app surprises me.

While using Medium on my iPhone recently, I tried to locate the option to write and search stories of my liking. After struggling for nearly 15 minutes, I shared my frustrations on Twitter.

The next day, I got a reply from Evan on Twitter.

His response made me wonder if I actually knew how to even use the app properly. I have to admit it was kind of embarrassing because I had been using the app for a long time.

Upon digging deeper, finally, I was able to locate what I was looking for.

Here are some screenshots if you have found similar difficulties in locating the menus of Medium app either on your iPhone or iPad.

So What’s Wrong with App’s usability?

Well, first of all, every app should be designed for simplicity.

And, if it’s truly simple, even non-tech savvy users should be able to use it without much hassle.

If you look at Medium app on your iOS device, it requires you to click on Help (located between Read and Sign Out) to visit the FAQ section.

While on FAQ page, you can see the Medium logo on the top left corner of the page. If you click on it, you can see the menu from where you can search stories as per your preferences among other things.

Personally, I think this is a huge usability issue since I would expect this feature should be made available above every page itself. This will help a user navigate to the menu to use other features.

Why this feature is hiding inside the FAQ page is beyond me.

Where’s the Home Page?

This is one of the FAQs available for the users in the iOS app.  Here’s what they say to answer this question:

Rather than bog you down with a homepage, we want to get you right into discovering the stories than matter to you.

To me, this answer doesn’t clearly say if there actually is a Home Page or not.

As of a matter of fact, there is one. (as I explained earlier in this post)

To see if I was only one struggling with the lack usability in this app, I asked my wife if she could help me find the home menu but she couldn’t either.

Well, I think that explains it.

I am hoping that Medium would improve this sooner than later.

PS: I’ve also written this post on Medium and I’m curious to see how other users react to this story.

Free Advice to Freelance SEO Content Writers

Many SEO content writers undermine the importance of improving their skills unless and until someone specifically points out the inherent issues in their writing consistently over a period of time.

It’s not possible to find freelancers who can take care of everything. They make mistakes over and over again. It depends on whether they are doing anything to improve their writing on a daily basis. If they are simply using all their times in completing projects, then they are leaving very little scope for self improvement. Unfortunately, many writers fall in this trap and undermine the importance improving their skills unless and until someone specifically points out the inherent issues in their writing consistently over a period of time.

On another note, web content writing is not only limited to writing content with proper grammar – it’s much more than that.

FYI, here are some of the best practices in content writing

#1 – Don’t Just Write, Address Queries

Writing an article is essentially all about addressing queries of your prospective readers. Therefore, the writer must have the intention to “address” the queries of the readers to begin with. This is where the research becomes helpful.  I would rather write one exhaustive article in 2000 words that fully addresses the queries of my readers than write 4 articles that don’t really serve any purpose. Let me put it this way – not all 2000-word articles are informative and research-driven, but it’s usually true the other way round.

But it’s not even about the word count. Unless one has the intention to conduct an in-depth research on the topic and tries to capture all aspects of a topic one’s article, it doesn’t make any sense.

#2 – Research, Research, Research

Research oriented articles usually contain references to authority websites which offer credence to the information. It does take time to write a research-oriented article but that makes perfect sense. Research oriented articles contain links, images, infographics and even videos to make the presentation interactive and fun to read. Write to engage your audience.

#3 – Go Beyond Just One Keyword per Article

The writer should have a sense of SEO while writing the content. A good SEO copy is not about keyword stuffing – it’s about knowing where to place the keywords (and its semantic alternatives) that blend naturally with the text. Ideally, articles should have more than just one keyword.

#4 – Mind Your Grammar or Your Readers Will

Finally, the quality of grammar, vocabulary, flow and presentation matter a lot. If the readers are educated enough and they find the opening paragraph has basic grammar issues, the copy will lose its credibility straight away and the readers will simply ignore the copy.

Be careful about the use of commas. Many writers undermine the importance of commas, which creates confusion for the readers.

Even, Google would not value a copy much if it has grammar issues. It’s one of the 200 signals Google takes into account before evaluating the quality of a copy.

There’s a great tool for measuring the quality of your content called Atomic Reach. It helps you measure the quality of your unpublished content based off a number of parameters and then suggests ways to improve upon those areas so you can achieve the highest possible quality for your content.