Marketing automation has become the lynchpin of successful marketing campaign management, yet many brands struggle to fully maximize their marketing automation ROI. We settle for automating manual tasks -- like lead management, email campaign development and landing page creation –because we're too busy to learn what marketing automation can really do for campaign effectiveness. The time has come to move from simply running campaigns automatically to running them intelligently. For more about marketing stacks, watch the on-demand webinar MarTech Madness: How to evaluate your marketing stack. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), a new breed of marketing automation solutions can "mimic" human intelligence and recommend marketing actions.

Hidden in the most recent version of Chrome is the ability to change its default search engine to a more privacy-friendly option. With the release of Chrome 73, Google has quietly introduced DuckDuckGo as a preferred search option in more than 60 markets including the United States and the United Kingdom. While Google didn't offer much fanfare for the change -- at least in comparison to flagship features like new support for media keys -- the change can be spotted on GitHub. In a note on the code repository site, Google acknowledges that it updated the available search engines based on "new usage statistics" from "recently collected data." In most countries, the list of options also includes Google, Yahoo and Bing.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." – Arthur C. Clarke (1961) This quote couldn't apply better to general search engines and web ranking algorithms. You can ask Bing about mostly anything and you'll get the best 10 results out of billions of webpages within a couple of seconds. If that's not magic, I don't know what is! Sometimes the query is about an obscure hobby. Sometimes it's about a news event that nobody could have predicted yesterday. Sometimes it's even unclear what the query is about!

These may include misspellings and typos, elisions/omissions, unusual phrasing/syntactic structures, the wrong word(s) being used, negations ("not x"), things that have only just happened etc. etc. etc.

Google's new research has discovered a way to join the best of both approaches. They use "extractive summaries" to extract the important facts from web documents and then apply the "abstractive" approach to paraphrase the content. This approach creates a new document based on the information found on the web, creating Google's own version of Wikipedia. Google's new algorithm is described in a research paper titled, Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences

One of the biggest mistakes made by business owners and native digital marketers is being too focused on vanity keywords and search volume as the indicator of SEO success. This article will focus on user intent, often referred to as "searcher intent", as the most valuable point of focus for SEO success, in any SEO campaign. Let's start off by explaining what searcher intent actually is… Searcher intent (also known as "user intent") is the motive a person has for carrying out a query through a search engine. Understanding and optimising for your customers' intent is critical for SEO. How we search for answers has evolved and changed over the years. And with that change, search engine algorithms have been adjusted to return the most relevant results. In the beginning, search engines returned results based on a pretty simplistic formula: They would look at basic factors such as the density of keywords matching the query and some more elusive factors like PageRank. SEO professionals and spammers took advantage of this with keyword stuffing, hiding text techniques and buying links. The era of black hat SEO, unfortunately, blossomed. It was, and will always be, in Google's best interest to become better at answering queries. SEO success used to be built on gaming search engines, but now SEO is about optimising for what the user is trying to accomplish. As it should be, we're no longer writing for robots and algorithms.

Creating an automation strategy should be top of mind in 2019 – indeed, it was identified by 61 percent of marketers as the top priority for optimizing marketing automation efforts in a recent industry survey. Researchers also identified the delivery of personalized content and integration of marketing systems as the most challenging barriers to your success with marketing technology. SEO and Automation is a big part of the solution. Automation is critical in making informed, data-driven decisions in a world in which the amount of data companies are attempting to manage is unprecedented. But we're at the point now where, as marketers have attempted to automate various tasks, many are struggling with unwieldy stacks of different technologies all vying for resources and budget.

Webmaster Hangouts debuted a bilingual Telugu and English version. I have watched it and was impressed with the quality of information about content that ranks, the so-called medic update and a discussion of soft ranking factors. There is a wealth of quality information shared. I may be writing more about what's in that Webmaster Hangout but you should really take the time to view the entire hangout because there is a lot of quality information spoken in English, plus subtitles in the form of Closed Captioning should you need it to follow along. For example, one person asked how important was usability and user experience as ranking factors.

The main goal of this paper is to explore latent topic analysis (LTA), in the context of quantum information retrieval. LTA is a valuable technique for document analysis and representation, which has been extensively used in information retrieval and machine learning. Different LTA techniques have been proposed, some based on geometrical modeling (such as latent semantic analysis, LSA) and others based on a strong statistical foundation. However, these two different approaches are not usually mixed. Quantum information retrieval has the remarkable virtue of combining both geometry and probability in a common principled framework. We built on this quantum framework to propose a new LTA method, which has a clear geometrical motivation but also supports a well-founded probabilistic interpretation. An initial exploratory experimentation was performed on three standard data sets. The results show that the proposed method outperforms LSA on two of the three datasets. These results suggests that the quantum-motivated representation is an alternative for geometrical latent topic modeling worthy of further exploration.

While many of us enjoy longer vacations and sunshine during the summer, major retailers spend the warmer months getting ready for the biggest sales events of the year. In fact, many retailers will report more than 50 percent of their annual profits from a single sales event during the coming fall months. In 2016, Alibaba's Singles Day grossed $17.8 billion in 24 hours, and that figure rose to $25.3 billion in 2017: In the United States, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2016 sales combined brought in $6.79 billion: These events kick off with Labor Day sales (back to school), which is just around the corner, and end with the holiday shopping season. With online merchandise selling out in seconds and competitive price wars getting exceedingly high, it's no wonder retailers utilize summer months to prepare for eager shoppers. While retailers are focusing on campaigns, commercials, margins and inventory, what can a search engine optimization specialist (SEO) do to help a client's bottom line?