Wikia Search Alpha Launched »

January 7, 2008

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Jimmy Wales announced the Alpha release of Wikia Search, which many have been waiting for for about a year since he first announced the project. I jumped over there to the alpha site to check it out and was registered in just a few minutes. Registering allows access to some of the “social” features like building your profile, uploading photos, you know – the usual stuff that a social network offers.

For those not familiar with the project, the idea behind it is a human-edited search engine designed to be harder to spam. Human-edited like Wikiapedia and harder to spam un-like Google.

Since it is Alpha, the results are pretty bad at the moment. However, as more people visit the site, they are sure to improve in the coming weeks. Visitors are encouraged register and start working on the “mini-articles”. These will help to improve the search results and their purposes are listed as:

• Short definitions
• Disambiguations
• Photos
• See also

The other interesting feature of Wikia Search is that Wales feels he can grab about 5% of the Search market, which could be possible considering Wikia Search incorporates the human-edited aspect of Wikiapedia and adds Social Networking features as well. But, if the interest wanes after a few months, that might be a bit ambitious. Currently, there is a great buzz surrounding the project, but that usually happens anytime something like this is launched. The trick will be to maintain and increase the level of user participation, which will be helped by the Social aspect I am sure.

More to follow as we play around with it, but don’t wait for us – try it for yourself.

More Thoughts on Google Penalties »

January 5, 2008

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Like many other blog owners, we offer space to advertisers. If our blog theme is related to the particular product they offer, they may want to be listed on our site. That is taking advantage of the power of the Internet.

Google, however, is concerned that web site owners will simply sell space (and a link to their web site) to anyone and everyone and I can totally understand their concern. There are countless examples of people simply wanting to “buy” a link on a popular site in hopes of getting a boost in PR. It is lame, spammy technique and has been abused for years. Google does not want a site to benefit by using techniques like this and I completely agree (although if you Google “buy links” you will see that the sites listed as sellers of links still have PR. Hmm, must be a mistake.).

Anyway, what I don’t agree with is Google’s practice of lumping together ALL sites that sell advertising space because they can’t figure out which ones are spammy and which ones are just trying to advertise related products or services legitimately. In its current form, Google is penalizing us along with blatant spammers.

The fact that we have some advertising showing on our tech blog does not change the quality of our site’s content. For example, here are a few of our more popular posts:

• What To Do if You Suspect Identity Theft
• McAfee Offers Free Rootkit Detector
• Setup a Secure Home Network
• Secure Your Wireless Router
• Small Businesses Increasingly Targeted by Hackers

Those are posts that get hundreds and hundreds of views each month. We wrote them to be of service to our readers. If we make some money because of them, great. But we wrote them because we thought they contained important, quality information. So, just because we sell some advertising, all of a sudden the content on our site is polluting Google’s index and we get our PR stripped? Are you kidding me? That does not add up to me, but, whatever. It is your Search Engine. Do what you want.

If the only penalty for selling advertising was a reduction (or complete removal) of Pagerank, fine with me. I could really care less about Google pagerank in its current format. Although a reduction in PR certainly can hurt the perceived value of advertising on a particular site, that is about all it does right now. Pagerank fails as an effective tool for determining the value of a given web site. It is broken and only seems to really matter to newbies that don’t know any better. Don’t get me wrong – Pagerank is worth something because Google says that it is and they control an almost 60% market share of Internet searches. But it certainly is not the powerful tool that it could be or maybe even used to be.

In the end, while I did not really care that our PR was stripped, selling a few ads each month is not worth the risk of having our web site removed from Google’s Index and that is exactly how Google wants us to react. Since our tech blog was manually reviewed by Google and found to be selling advertising, we had to make adjustments to avoid the risk of de-indexing; we could not just sit back and hope that Googlebot didn’t notice.

November Search Engine Market Share »

January 3, 2008

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There were no significant changes in Search Engine market share from October to November ‘07, according to Virginia based Internet information provider comScore. Google is still way out in front compared to the others and, although Yahoo! dropped and AOL/Time Warner grabbed a little more share, everyone basically kept their same positions in November.

Of the 10 billion searches tracked, here is how they broke down during the month:

• Google captured 5.9 billion
• Yahoo! accounted for 2.2 billion searches
• Microsoft dropped just below the 1 billion mark at 984 million
• Ask was used 463 million times
• and AOL/Time Warner sites were used for 453 million searches.

AOL/Time Warner had the largest jump during the month (0.3 points) and Yahoo! had the biggest drop of -0.4 points.

For all you visual people out there, we have a pretty, little Flash graphic in the right column, so check it out