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Science For SEO Partial
I’ve been catching up on all my reading these last couple of weeks and I particularly liked “From X-Rays to Silly Putty via Uranus: Serendipity and its Role in Web Search”. It’s by Paul André from Southampton University together with Jaime Teevan and Susan Dumais from Microsoft Research.
Louis Pasteur once famously said: “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” Serendipity is the effect of discovering something really interesting, whilst looking for something else entirely. A completely unintended but fortunate discovery. X-rays, silly putty and Uranus were all chance discoveries. This paper investigates this effect in relation to the web and asks this question: Does improving search engine results through personalisation diminish chance encounters with highly prized information?
Their goal:
“By its nature, serendipity is hard to study. In this paper rather than trying to induce or identify serendipity, we conducted a study to explore the potential for serendipitous encounters. Specifically we examine:
1. Whether there is the potential for serendipitous encounters during Web search; and
2. Whether the ability …