von Roland Hachmann | Dez 8, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, SEO / SEA
Search Engine Watch reports on the new Yahoo! Answers, that started just now. Some other comments are here and here.
Questions can derive from all sorts of areas, even things like „where can i get the best coffee in Frankfurt“
The whole system relies on points that are given for each answer and which rank the respondents in terms of trustworthiness.
I like this approach of Yahoo! as it much more resembles the true web as it is coming to be, then Google Answers, where the people asking questions have to pay „experts“ for their answers, as Business2Blog writes.
Yahoo!’s approach is much more „wiki“, where everyone can write, and it goes much more along the lines of „wisdom of the crowds“ where the aggregated masses know more than the single expert in his lonely office.
It’s still in beta, so we’ll have to wait if it works. But just by choosing this approach, Yahoo! proved that they understand the fabric of todays web much better than Google.
(Nevermind Yahoo! „choosing“ Flickr, myWeb, etc. – taking all their recent efforts into consideration, they clearly a very good sense of what’s driving todays social web developments)
von Roland Hachmann | Okt 23, 2005 | Blog, Digital News, SEO / SEA
First, Google did great things in helping everyone find relevant information on the web. Now it is one of those helping to add clutter. The blog-provider blogger.com, acquired by Google some time ago, is one of those blogservices enabling splogs. Within the across the Sound Podcast, Steve Rubel also mentions this upcoming problem. There is a couple of stories about this, here, here and here.
The move was designed to doctor search results and boost traffic to those sites by fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly linked-to destinations.
Email spam is bad, as it clogs up user’s email box and make it difficult for marketers to send even permission based emails, as these might not be opened either.
Splogs don’t affect users directly (apart from those subscribed to certain RSS feeds). But it can have a large negative impact on the blogosphere (and consumer generated media, as Steve puts it), as well as information access. As the quote above says, it’s about fooling searchengines and hence distorting searchengine results in the favour of the splogged (ie linked to) websites.
If a bot creates a couple of fake blogs all linking to a site for, say, Viagra, tagged with „pharmaceutical“ and other tags, then this will have a high position within a search for pharmaceuticals. Even though the user will (probably) have searched for more objective information.
Technorati writes, that 2% – 8% of new weblogs are fake or spam weblogs.
So this might indeed have a direct impact for users. If good information cannot be found as easily any more because of bad information, because the search results show too many splogged sites, then the whole concept of the web as a medium for quickly finding relevant information is in danger.
So what can be done?
First option: filter blogs from search results. But this is not really what the search engines will want (remember Yahoo! integrating blogs into news search results). This would kill most consumer generated media and put the web back to where it was 5 years ago. Not to mention of the loss of valuable information that quite a few bloggers provide!
second option: make it impossible for the bots to open blogs automatically. There must be a technical solution for this, Google!!
btw, Fightsplog wants to take action, so go there an help (if you can).
von Roland Hachmann | Okt 11, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, SEO / SEA
Sean, (whom I don’t know personally, but happens to a friend of a friend of mine (Ace)) pointed to the fact that a cool meta search engine is live: gada.be
Most notable benefits:
– since you enter the search terms as part of the URL, you can bookmark regular search items (if you regular search for a certain word, you can bookmark http://word.gada.be)
– as the search term is part of the URL, it is much more convenient when entering the URL through a mobile phone.
– it’s a meta search. So it returns results from Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. all at once.
(More infos here, here and here.)
And of course (and not least), the blog post of the originator of all this.
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 30, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, SEO / SEA
This was a comment to an article at AdJab, but you should also read this article:
I don’t think, the current discussion is about Google vs Microsoft competing on the same platform (software). I also agree, that Google doesn’t have a platform (yet).
I think this is about influence. And power. Microsoft was and is gaining influence on software. Products that let you manage/store information. They built a platform, which has reached every desktop PC near you.
Google is gaining influence on leveraging that information. Building a yet to be defined platform. And yes, they finance their endeavours by advertising. But ultimately, it’s about information, their mission statement says that. And, from leveraging information via control to power it’s a short distance. Once they have achieved that, they have a „platform“. It’s disconnected from software, hardware or anything else we define as a platform these days.
It’s about information and control. And it will make all other platforms obsolete, because access to and leveraging of, information is not defined by operating systems like Windows any longer, but by, well, whatever Google will call it…
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 25, 2005 | Blog, SEO / SEA
The New York Times has an article about the recent developments of Google, how it leaves puberty, appears to be more like one of those establishment companies (and not much longer like a rebellious Silicon Valley company) and turns rather arrogant and hungry for control, power and money. Sort of like what Microsoft used to go through and now is…
Some nice quotes:
It was not that long ago that Google reigned here as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that Silicon Valley loves most to hate.
Google is at that inflection point where it’s starting to act like an establishment company, and Silicon Valley is a rebel culture
Google is the new evil empire, because they’re in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information.
I have already raised some doubts about Google here and here .
It’s going to be interesting over the next 2-5 years how Google will shape and embrace the world of information…
von thecod | Aug 4, 2005 | Blog, SEO / SEA
Ever more of the web is becoming searchable. And Yahoo! seems to be one of the leaders here, believe it or not. Marketing Vox pointed me to the fact, that in addition to video search (which Google still doesn’t have) it now offers music and sound search. They are not the first, but the most comprehensive, as Yahoo! is allowed to scan most of the internets commercial sites:
a new search engine feature that will pore through millions of songs offered by popular Internet music services like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster.
writes Businessweek online. But it is also about newscasts, speeches, etc. and, yes, podcasts.
The index identifies the content by reading information – known as „metadata“ – embedded in the files. Which should, hopefully make it relevant – more relevant as if they just searched the site on which the sound files are placed onto.
And one more:
The diversification beyond searching simple text online reflects the Web’s evolution into a multimedia hub
Apparently, we can’t expect anything similar from Google soon, as it „isn’t yet so musically inclined.“
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