I ran across a slew of new-to-me vocabulary the other day which seemed worth recording. The first pertained to a topic that is on many people’s minds, namely AI and search.[1] People[2] are turning to AI such as ChatGPT instead of using traditional (ha) search; as we’ve all seen, Google et al. have added AI summaries to search engine results pages (SERPs).
In the old days of Google’s page ranking, people who published web content tried to game the system so that their content would appear high in the search results, leading to click-throughs to their sites.[3] These strategies became known as search engine optimization (SEO). Content publishers still want click-throughs, so now the challenge is how to get AI algorithms to pick up your content in their summaries. Answer: answer engine optimization, or AEO. Same game, same goals, different strategies.
I just ran across this term recently, but it looks like it was starting to emerge around 2020 (Are You Ready for Answer Engines?), or maybe a little before as SEO experts pivoted to the challenge of AEO (video: How Information Will Transform the Search Landscape). Anyway, we’ll be seeing this term a lot in future.
Speaking of pivoting, now we move to traffic. In an excellent article about traffic design (Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice), I found a handful of fun terms, some of which were new to me. Some are defined in the article, and for others I found definitions elsewhere.
A living street “use[s] physical elements like bends, curves, and trees to deliberately slow traffic and provide for shared space between pedestrians, cars, and bicycles”.
Self-explaining roads “intuitively guide drivers to safe speeds via engineering features”.
A 2+1 road is a “three lane road where two lanes run in one direction and one in the other, alternating every few kilometers, separated by a cable barrier”.
Road furniture consists of “all fixtures on the road and within the road reserve that are intended to provide information or safety to a road user and includes traffic lights, sign posts, traffic signs […]” — Law Insider.
A road diet “… typically involves converting an existing four-lane undivided roadway to a three-lane roadway consisting of two through lanes and a center two-way left-turn lane” — US DOT FHA.
Stroads are roads “where cars reach high speeds yet must also avoid drivers entering from adjacent businesses and homes”.
Btw, if you, like me, are interested in traffic engineering, you’ll definitely want to check out Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt. (He probably mentions some or all of these terms, but it’s been a while since I read the book, so I don’t remember.)
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[1] I wonder to what extent AI has been lexicalized and divorced from its origin as the initialism for “artificial intelligence”. Which in itself is a term that has a variety of definitions that have moreover changed a bit over time.
[2] 27% of Americans, to be specific.
[3] And not to appear, to use an older term from a more callow time, in the Google ghetto, i.e., on page 2 or later.