Using AI to Get Web Traffic
If you ask Darcy (http://www.netadventures.biz/darcy.htm) if she likes coffee, she has no way of knowing if coffee is a person, a city in Europe, something you eat, or something you drink. You may get a weird answer. Ask if she drinks coffee, however, and you will find drinks, coffee is defined as a concept and she can give you an appropriate reply.
A search engine such as Google is also an AI machine, and can determine the concept from looking at a large number of replies to previous queries on coffee. In fact, Google is working hard to enable their engine to track the history of your searches (and other tasks you do on the web) to enable it to better understand the queries you submit. Even with this, however, at the present time Google is severely limited on understanding your questions because it has to work from such a broad base of knowledge and there isn’t enough computer power to resolve this at the present time. Adding more Linux servers on Google is not the answer. Amazon does some of this by tracking the history of your purchases and recommending books based on this.
There is a solution, however, if you design the AI engine to address a small knowledge base, and this is exactly what IBM is doing with their Web Fountain project. In fact, IBM won’t even tell you much about who their customer base is for these engines. John Battelle in his book The Search tells us you can put a platform like WebFountain on a site with a friendly interface on top and a small company or individual can get in on the party and beat Google at their own game.
Isn’t this where Darcy is going? Follow the logic here. The companies that succeed the best on the Internet are those that address a niche market. For example, trying to start a web site to sell books puts you in competition with Amazon and a dozen plus other companies doing the same thing. But a web site selling books related to ancient Egyptian history is targeting a niche market and could well succeed. You could also add a very targeted AI engine to this niched site that would pull in its weight in gold.
Same thing with a breeder selling Abyssinian cats. Suppose the database stores the concept and reply as:
| Concept |
Question | Darcy’s reply |
| about cats | What can you tell me about cats? | The question is too vague. Can you be more specific? |
| about Abyssinian cats | What can you tell me about Abyssinian cats? | What do you want to know about Abyssinian cats? |
| history of the Abyssinian cat | What is the history of the Abyssinian cat? |
In all probability, the history of the Abyssinian cat began in England. - not in Egypt as the story often goes…….. |
You ask the question,
and this drives the reply from the concept.
Our web traffic quickly doubled when she hit our home page. Why not contact us and get Darcy or one of her variations on your site?
http://www.netadventures.biz