Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 1235: New Search Algorithm

purposed worKING No Comments

“Search for the Lord and for his strength; continually seek him.”


A little known fact to most of us, well very well known to those who manage and watch search engine optimization (SEO) is that Google just changed their search engine algorithm, again.  They don’t change it every day but this latest change follows a recent overhaul in 2010. Google calls their new updates interesting things like, “Caffeine Update” and “Hummingbird” (the latest version).  Along the way they released partial updates like “Panda” and “Penguin”.  If you are wondering, what does this mean to you, well, maybe nothing, but it’s a good chance that your search results are going to change.  What is new is further advancement of “Conversational Search”, which should give us all a more natural way of typing in our queries and getting back what we wanted. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land describes an example this way:


“”What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example. Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words. In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.” So, we could be at the dawn of a new era of search, or maybe not.  But, if we have a website, we should be watching to see if our SEO is improving or not and then adapt as needed.  
 
I love that God gives us always available search access to Him and He always answers.  Of course, like some search results, we may not understand how that answer is what we were looking for, but what we can hold onto and always trust is that His answers will always come back to us and whatever they are they will always be the right answer for us at the time.  Our search engine?  Prayer!  What have we been holding back that needs a little searching done today?  He’s waiting on us with His divine algorithm!

Reference:  Psalm 105:4 (New Living Translation)