Posted on Aug 07th, 2006

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In a previous post I talked about the short head and long tail of keyword traffic. The 80/20 rule doesn’t quite apply but some general 20-40/80 rule does. Even though multiple and more targetted keyword phrases don’t cost the searcher anything, keyword traffic still roughly follows a pareto curve.
In his book Chris Anderson asserts the 80/20 rule is enforced by powers of economics. In the music industry the risks and costs to music companies defines what becomes a “hit”. In keywords the only powers driving towards a pareto distrobution are similarities in the way people express themselves. Its only a small slice of expression, a few words used to describe something we want, but the head and tail distribution suggests we all comunicate in strikingly similar ways. Or at least a lot of us do.
Building on my new PHP POS Tagger and my PHP ngram tokenizer I plan to study wikipedia as a corpus to derive some data about distribution curves of the most popular ngrams and how they can relate to keyword selection.

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