Saturday, January 05, 2008

Featured Classical Music

This article really is about Classical Music, but first I'm going to "entertain" you with a brief diatribe on the semantic web and search engine optimization. People like choices, but they don't like to be overwhelmed with a very large number of choices. Amazon.com's approach to this is a logical one: They arrange their products into broad categories, which are divided into subcategories, and further into sub-subcategories for as many levels as they find appropriate, as in the familiar outline form.

This is reasonable, but it presents a problem to those searching for products. Without a key to Amazon's taxonomy (or outline), one might easily take a wrong turn in the process of "drilling down" to the specific target classification. Search engines don't adequately address this problem. Attempts to search for a specific category simply return all items containing the search keywords instead of limiting results to category headings.

Google's PageRank alogrithm (and other search engine ranking schemes that are less well-documented) only compounds this problem. Briefly, search engines assume that the more specific "lower" levels of the outline are less significant than the "higher," more general headings. In fact, we humans already have our own taxonomy in our rich and diverse languages (English, in this case). It is far more likely that we will select highly specific terms in our very first search attempt than extremely broad ones. PageRank is upside-down.

What does this have to do with classical music? Only this: Amazon's Classical Music category is a recent spin-off of their more general Music category and has relatively few subcategories. Therefore, I hope to achieve my goal of creating more useful search engine listings sooner and more directly in these top-level categories:





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