As my final post for April 2006 (it’s April 30th after all) there’s yet another gem from Microsoft called the Content Categorization Engine.

Looking at one of my clients’ site I can now see what catagories Microsoft thinks it’s in based on all it’s semantic analysis:

    Categories                                Confidence  
 
Personal\Home 0.343
Shopping\Buying Guides 0.205
Work & Money\Companies 0.120
Work & Money\Industries 0.072
Work & Money\Personal Finance 0.041
Library\Humanities 0.017
Shopping\Online Stores 0.014
Library\Society 0.014
Work & Money\Business 0.012
Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.012
Lifestyle\Gardening 0.009
Work & Money\Professions 0.009
Computing\Multimedia 0.007
Lifestyle\Pets & Animals 0.005
Computing\Software 0.005

This information is useful in both search term matching AND search term advertising - but how to best use that information is going to vary somewhat.  

When we look at the leading competition, coolhouseplans.com - the catagorization is different

URL  Go    See Categories
    Categories                                Confidence  
 
Work & Money\Companies 0.914
Personal\Home 0.032
Shopping\Buying Guides 0.016
Work & Money\Industries 0.007
Work & Money\Personal Finance 0.004
Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.001
Library\Humanities 0.001
Work & Money\Business 0.001
Library\Society 0.001
Lifestyle\Gardening 0.001

I don’t know if that has anything to do with why the site tends to rank highly or not - and maybe I’m not the best judge of how to apply that information but I’m pointing to the tools are available to start using and testing and thinking.

Think about new ways to use these tools, new ways to compare sites and see if the search engines actually use any of these as ranking factors.