The Massive Challenge of Search Engine Complexity

Courtesy Stone Temple Consulting

The complexity of generating Search results online is HUGE.  The What’s So Hard About Search? infographic from SEO expert Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting takes a look at the massive numbers involved with indexing and searching the Web.

Building a search engine is a very complex task. I often find myself trying to justify to people why it is that search engines can’t understand their site. They seem fixated on believing that a search engine should understand it if a human can understand it. The short answer is that with an infinite amount of time the search engine could, but the scale of the Internet makes it oh so VERY hard.

The infographic below tries to give you some sense of the scale of the problem. Please note that a few numbers are hard to truly pin down, but I pulled them from the best sources I could. For example, no one really knows how many pages there are on the web, though Majestic SEO is aware of 3.7 trillion (the number I used) or the average web page size.

Regardless, the message is the same either way. The web is a really complex place!

Designed by InfoNewt, the design gathers data from a number of different sources to put together the picture of complexity.  Combining the number of web pages, the average number of links on each web page, the amount of data online and the number of searches every minute, you begin to understand the scale of the challenge search engines face.

This design takes a different approach by citing each data source along with it’s visualization instead of gathering them all at the bottom.  I think it works well with this many different data sources, and is easier for the readers to understand where each part of the data comes from.  All of the key elements are included at the bottom: copyright, brand logo and the URL to the infographic landing page so readers can always find the original (even when blogs repost it without linking or using the embed code).

I just have to say “Cheers!” to the developer teams that tackle this problem every day.  The scope of this challenge will only get bigger in the future!

Thanks to Eric and the team at Stone Temple for being great to work with!

Ruby on Rails Popularity Index 2012

Ruby on Rails isn’t about the gem, but to some people it is just as valuable. It allows people to enter the basic programming world as painless as possible. The Ruby on Rails Popularity Index 2012 infographic created by exist.com (found on infographicjournal.com) illustrating its popularity!

Ruby on Rails has taken the web development world by storm since its first full release in 2005. Yet with new web platforms arriving each day, usage share of frameworks has become quite fragmented. So in this post, I compiled the latest trends and figures of Ruby on Rails from different sources, as well as some stats of the Ruby language.

Here’s an infographic we’ve created that visualizes how far Ruby on Rails has gotten since its release in 2005.

This design from Exist.com comes from Philippines, so there are a couple English grammars errors like “oftenly”, which isn’t a real word.  The design does a good job gathering a number of stats from different sources together to show the general trend of growing usage of Ruby on Rails over the last 5 years or so.

It's All About The Images

Here’s some irony for you. It’s All About The Images infographic from MDG Advertising relays information visually about the importance of relaying information visually.  Yes, it’s very meta.

Some say image is everything, and that’s especially true on the Internet where the shift to visual optimization is playing an increasingly important role in the recent phenomenon of photo marketing. In light of their numerous benefits for brands of all kinds, MDG Advertising developed an insightful infographic that illustrates the influence of images on a company’s business, branding, search, and social media efforts. For insight on optimizing images for content and commerce, along with advice on image optimization techniques, take a look at the following infographic to see why images can help make success a snap.

In our world, this information is true for posting infographics as well as photo images.

Thanks for sending in the link!

Market and Competitive Intelligence Trends

Meidata brings us the Market and Competitive Intelligence Trends infographic that covers the sources and uses of competitive intelligence online and related Internet trends that affect the availability of information.

Meidata is a company in Israel, but has clients from around the world.  The infographic is based on their own internal information from global customers and system statistics, so this information is not available anywhere else in the world.

Designed by Robert Ungar at Meidata, the design is colorful and easy to follow.  A great design overall.  One of his best design accomplishments is the language translation.  More than merely pasting the translated text, the design has to account for the change in direction between Hebrew and English, and still tell a smooth story.

You can view the original design in Hebrew, and they just released an English language version (above) on their site, and you can download either the English PDF or the Hebrew PDF.

Thanks to Shaul from Meidata for sending in the link, providing the information and the English translated version.

The United States of Craigslist

Welcome to The United States of Craiglist! This infographic map, found on the IDV User Experience blog, shows approximately how craigslist divides its geographic zones across the U.S.! Very important for a website who bases its usefulness on location!

WHY?  Locality is inherent to the value of craigslist; I go to craigslist.org but I get kicked over to the local instance of craigslist (my IP address sources me to somewhere in the illustrious Lansing, MI).  But how does craigslist know where to send me?   Some mysterious system of assigning a geocoded IP address to just the right site must be in place…I wonder what that map looks like.

When Ian Clemens proposed the idea, I looked around to find an existing map of craigslist sites-to-areas -maybe even find the lookup that they themselves use. I couldn’t find anything like it.
Whether it matches their system well or not, here is a map that approximates geographic coverage to individual sites using a Voronoi process as a base (more info on process below).  It is at least a start at visualizing the geographic coverage and distribution of the community-driven instances of craigslist.  Shapes like this might provide some useful context for other data, demographic or market information, for instance.  Also, when pulled into VFX, it can serve as an input to some spatial querying on those other metrics.

It’s worth noting that this is not from Craigslist at all, but an outside analysis of the cities from the craigslist site and approximates the geographic areas covered by each.  A complete post about how this map was generated is available here, and they have even made all of the data files available in a number of different formats.  Bonus!

Craigslist doesn’t care about state lines, counties, time zones or voting districts.  They care about defining an area that covers certain population levels that effectively use their service.

Thanks to Jim for sending in the link!

Website Hosting Decisions

The Hosting Decisions, From the Chalkboard infographic from Rackspace UK Hosting helps customers to choose how to host their site with this visually decision map.

OK so you already know that we’ve been helping customers define their hosting needs for some years now.

But as customers adopt more service based computing resources like cloud hosting, it’s only logical that they will also now ask more of their hosting provider to ensure they are getting the correct solution.

So we thought hey, let’s produce an infographic to take customers through a simple decision making process on a route to the solution that’s right for them.

This one is a clear, focused topic.  Easy to read, and not a lot of illustrations or images to get in the way.  This decision for companies is actually a little more complicated, but the infographic does pose the right questions.

Thanks to Sav for sending in the link!

The Anatomy of a Perfect Website

The Anatomy of a Perfect Website from R.O.I Media does a really good job of looking at the primary components of a good website design.  There are many decisions that need to be made by website owners and designers in each of the different sections, and of course data should be driving those decisions.

Websites need a formula – a vivid blueprint that painstakingly weaves technicality, design and detail into something iconic and memorable. Without it, most wouldn’t function for more than a moment and they certainly wouldn’t impress. You may have navigation and usability down, but in today’s fast paced climate you’ll crash and burn without social media. What about SEO, where would it be without content? These are all the things we have to consider, if we are to succeed – from vital tracking and analytics to the often disregarded footer, every detail oils the machine. With that in mind, we bring you the Anatomy of a Perfect Website…

A couple things bother me about the visualizations used in the design.  Designers need to get the “area” of objects correct for the data visualizations to be accurate.  In the Social Media section, the size of the clocks with the site logos should represent the scale of the time spent on each of the sites, but the sizes aren’t actually connected to the values at all.  They’re only a series of increasing shapes without any meaning.  The Facebook clock should be at least five times the diameter shown.

Also, the Browser Statistics section is another victim of the “area” challenge.  I LOVE the visual design style of the color saturation only extending up on the logos as far as the statistics show!  However, you can’t just use the height of the percentage because all of the logos are round shapes.  You need to use the Area of a Circle Segment to calculate the appropriate height to use.  This visual design is probably close, but it’s not accurate.

Thanks to Francois for sending in the link!

The Life Cycle of a Web Page on StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon.com has shared a number of the differetn stats behind it’s social sharing service in the infographic The Life Cycle of a Web Page on StumbleUpon.  Designed by Column Five Media, the infographic focuses on the half-life of a link and the length of time users view pages and interact with StumbleUpon.  This information shows that the half-life of a StumbleUpon link is much longer than other social media sites that were shared by bit.ly in September.

You may have heard the stat that StumbleUpon drives more traffic referrals than any other social media site. We wanted to shed some light on this by describing the lifecycle of a web page in StumbleUpon, especially how long you could expect the average web page to keep getting visitors.

StumbleUpon doesn’t get as many mentions in the media as Facebook and Twitter, but the data indicates that they have more referrals than those two combined.  I see that here on the Cool Infographics blog occassionally.  When one of my posts is picked up in StumbleUpon is usually gets thousands of stumbles.

Found on Visual News and Fast Company Design.

Social Media Usage in the UK

Social Media Usage in the UK is a new infographic from Umpf.co.uk. 

We then analysed the results to bring what we believe is the most up-to-date snapshot of social media usage in the UK.  If you like statistics, you can view them all here.

Our infographic, created by Vapour, helps visualise statistics; it outlines the gender and age differences in social media usage.

It needs a title.

I love that they included a link to the data file in GoogleDocs in the original posting.

I like the idea of the Man/Woman stacked percentages.  Although, I’m guessing they didn’t calculate the icon shape areas to get the section sizes right, which makes the visualization false.  They probably just calculated the height of each section, which visually misinterprets the data.  YouTube is shown to be much bigger than it really is because the shape is widest there.

They don’t need the Key/Legend at the bottom (“Legends are Evil”).  The social media icons were clearly used in the first bar chart, and could have been included in them all for clarity.  Build the data right into the charts, and you don’t need a legend.

At the bottom should be a copyright (or creative commons license), the URL to the original infographic, the Umpf company logo,  the sources listed and the designer credit.  Once this infographic is posted elsewhere on the Internet (like here on the Cool Infographics blog) all of the information that was included in the original posting is lost.  (unless a good blog author, like me, includes the links)

Thanks to Jon for sending in the link!

The Blog Tree: New Growth infographic and Q&A

Eloqua and JESS3 have partnered again to design The Blog Tree: New Growth (building on the success of the original Blog Tree infographic project from last year).  The new version focuses on new blogs from the last few years (INCLUDING Cool Infographics!) and uses the Edelman BlogLevel as the scoring system (a ranking system I hadn’t heard of before). They are also using SlideShare.net as an embedded PDF viewer so you can interact with the clickable version that takes you to any of the blogs by clicking on any particular leaf.

The Blog Tree: New Growth

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A couple things worth mentioning about the project:

• The clickable version is available on SlideShare.net or as a downloadable PDF file.
• They are using Facebook photos in a unique way.  They are asking anyone interested in being a part of the next version to “Like” the Eloqua page and tag themselves in the image of this year’s Blog Tree.
• They’ve added the concept of site badges this year for anyone listed on the tree.  From a content stance, this is a great way to encourage long-term links from influencial blogs.

From the Eloqua blog post:

We’re calling today’s visual is The Blog Tree: New Growth edition because it celebrates a very important group of bloggers. New ones.  All gene pools benefit from healthy DNA, and if the blogosphere is going to continue to evolve, it’s important that new voices are heard. The Blog Tree: New Growth cheers about 60 active, insightful blogs launched (or significantly re-engineered) after January 1, 2009.  It’s truly a collection of the freshest voices on the Web.

After combing through the feedback we received on the original Blog Tree, we made two significant changes in this version:

1. Interactivity: Today’s infographic is interactive. Every leaf links to the corresponding blog. Interactivity was a popular request in the wake of last year’s visual, and when we shared a draft with the bloggers featured on the New Growth version, they too asked for it. The result is an infographic that fulfills its promise of making it easier for you to discover blogs we think you’ll love.
   
   
2. (Much) Better Ranking System: Last year’s version looked only at Web traffic, and we received a bit of pushback on that ranking model. So we turned to one of the world’s most reliable sources of trust and influence: Edelman. We used Edelman’s BlogLevel tool as our sole data supplier because it gave us the most holistic view of each blog’s relative influence, popularity, engagement and trustworthiness.

I asked Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing at Eloqua, a few questions about the project:

Cool Infographics: You’ve partnered with JESS3 on a number of infographic projects now.  What do you see as the biggest benefit of designing infographics as online content?

Joe Chernov: Marketing today is all about having strong “fast twitch” muscles. It’s about creating content, lots and in rapid succession, that appeals to viewers with short attention spans. It’s a hell of a challenge, especially for a business-to-business technology company, like Eloqua, whose story typically takes a little longer to tell. The benefit of an infographic is that it’s like a Trojan Horse: The visual captures attention, giving the marketer time to convey a message.

Cool Infographics: What did you learn from the original Blog Tree that changed how this one was designed?

Joe Chernov: We learned what worked. It’s funny, in “post-mortem” meetings, companies often focus on what didn’t work. But it’s also important to inspect what did work. When we released the original Blog Tree, I hesitated. I thought people might accuse it of being too high concept or pandering. Neither accusation was made. My hope was that the public recognized that we put thought into the selection, that it was truly a meritocracy. So what we learned going into the New Growth edition is that the key to success was found in the quality of the curation. Sure there were some improvements that needed to be made at the margins. Using traffic as the sole metric was a ridiculous oversimplification — and one that was 100% my fault — and, as you pointed out insightfully, the leaves absolutely should link through to more content, preferably the blogs themselves. So we made those changes.

Cool Infographics: What would you tell companies considering infographics as part of their marketing strategy?

Joe Chernov: Respect the medium. Simply calling a bunch of Excel line graphs and bar charts an infographic doesn’t make it one. Stuff like this (http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2011/09/attention-b2b-marketers-embrace-the-mobile-web.html), I believe, damages the medium because it eliminates art and nuance, which are essential elements of a good infographic. Before we publish any infographic I ask myself, “What would David McCandless (http://www.davidmccandless.com/) say if he saw this? Would I be proud to show it to him?” Try to be an ambassador for the medium, because it’s under duress.

Cool Infographics: I had never heard of the Edelman BlogLevel before.  Why did you use that as your blog metric in the design?

Joe Chernov: We needed a better metric than the simple traffic data that we used to grade blogs in the original Blog Tree. Not only was that metric one-dimensional, it was also a poor measure of the quality of a new blog, which we were trying to highlight in the New Growth version we just released. After all, it takes a while to build up traffic to a blog. So we looked for a multidimensional blog “grader” from a trusted, independent source. Edelman and trust are synonymous, at least in the communications world. And their BlogLevel tool evaluates much more than traffic. It looks at engagement and the soft science of trust. I have also collaborated with David Armano, one of Edelman Digital’s leaders, in the past so I welcomed the chance to partner with him again.

Cool Infographics: In your opinion, why do blogs continue to be relevant online?

Joe Chernov: Because this is the era of transparency. Buyers want to know, really know, who they are doing business with. The blog, or at least should be, a window into the organization.

Also, check out Joe’s presentation about infographics that he gave at this year’s Content Marketing World conference, and available on SlideShare:

Infographics in 15 Minutes

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