– Eric

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Not much updates here, the project is on hold until the end of the year. We have too many projects spinning and had to choose which is more important. Not easy to do, but essential.

Cheers

Sahar

From that perspective:

All actions are effectively experiments that yield new questions, some actions are *only* experiments that yield only the clues to what experiment to try next, or to when to stop experimenting. Judea Pearl approaches this technically with his “algrebra of doing” approach. Jane Jacobs explained the the problem reasonably well in layman’s terms in her last book, “Dark Age Ahead” where she decries the lack of understanding of the scientific “question chain” method in large scale decision making. She is concerned about the way answers are chained together based on axioms in theology, finance, medicine, agriculture, engineering and theorizes that a “Dark Age” comes when the combined assumptions built into many such decisions overwhelms the ability to question. As she said is happening now in North American society in particular.

Back to the search engine, finding which questions are actually related to the topic can be quite difficult. Simple keyword matching to see if the keywords are in the question, as you seem to be doing already, can be useful but I suspect in the long run you need some semantic maps to match terms like “hemochromatosis” that are extremely statistically unlikely to appear in searches on any other topic, thus effectively are queries on cystic fibrosis and should be treated as such. Same for “other names people use for cystic fibrosis”. Integrating RDF and semantic tagging behind the scenes is the standard way to approach this problem. There are some more exciting approaches too in the semantic web and tag community.

Have come to the conclusion that in using SEO and meta tags in each of our “REAL” sites we need to use a more ‘questioning’ approach to our content.

BrutChampagne.com could and should have a headline or tag asking,
“What is brut champagne?”, “Where Can I buy Brut Champagne?”, “How is Brut Champagne made?”

These added tags would certainley assist in indexing these domains and sites in the search engines (and Assista.com?) under terms I have seen used in my logs many times.

Cheers Sahar!

Chris

Assista is an affiliate marketers dream, and when Assista goes live it will spawn the most ravenous breed of affiliate marketing the internet has ever seen. Where there is money to be made there is change and evolution.

Everyone writes for the search engines based on guesses to long tail keywords. This will end the guesswork almost all together.

Tell me, will Assista be an enhancement to Google’s search results or are you thinking to develop your own search engine rankings?

In my limited thinking, I would choose the enhancement. Standing on top of those giants shoulders could give you instant credibility, much greater long term leverage, and vehicle to cash in on a lot of Adsense clicks. Kinda like what Firefox did but your idea would be much greater.

Sorry for my vision, I just looove the concept!!!

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Thanks JR for the positive comment. Assista is built on its own, currently running on 150 servers and have 20 full time employees working on it for last 3+ years. As with everything we do we will expand the project once go live into many areas, from building addons to building supporting sites and services.
Assista coems with API so we will encourage others to come up with their own ideas using our data.
I don’t think Assista is a replacement for Google or other search engines, I think they can co-exist. Assista compliments others rather then replace them. It is a complete different system and provide results a traditional search engine is not looking for. Once results are provided, again, they are presented in a different way then traditional search engines.
I don’t believe traditional engines are the solution long term, I think many systems can co-exist, and traditional engines of course will evolve as well.
Cheers
Sahar

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Thanks. there will be time for these discussions once we put the site up. I hope before year’s end, trying to meet that deadline.
Cheers
Sahar

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I just meant that I too was fortunate to realize that it was much easier to learn from those who’d already learned than to learn everything myself - and that the key to doing this was figuring out which questions to ask…

The internet is such an incredible resource because people have ‘been there, done that’ and decided to share their notes… It makes learning so much faster and easier than it was before…

I can honestly say that I haven’t had an unanswered question in the past 6 or 7 years since I discovered Google… It’s all there - very few times have I not found what I was looking for almost immediately…

You just need to know how to search - which is essentially knowing which questions to ask (as you full well know ;))… When Assista launches, it sounds like all you’ll need to know is which subject you want to learn about… This is the missing link between knowing how to rock Google and being stuck with oodles of results that aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for…

It sounds to me like your project could be a real game changer… Can’t wait to get a hold of it for some beta testing…

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I can honestly say that I haven’t had an unanswered question in the past 6 or 7 years since I discovered Google”¦ It’s all there - very few times have I not found what I was looking for almost immediately”¦

“You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.” - John J. Plomp