« Sunday Morning | Home School Radicals » |
Search Engine Ramblings
I've had my current collection of web sites up for about a year now. I haven't publicized them much and already they are showing up on most search engines. I've used searches like tyler web sites tyler forums dana bell and get first page results. I even get on the front page above the fold with a search for this blog with dana bell blog. About the only engine that doesn't do so well is Ask.com and those that use their engine.
There is also a new search site coming in 2007 hakia.com is already around with their beta and it looks good. With simple searches you might get a categorized list of different types of searches. Try a search for cancer.
Search engine sites are a real service to the web and surprisingly still all free. Not that I don't have some complaints. As spam continues to dominate email spam sites are also growing wildly. With every search result you are likely to get multiple links to sites that deceive you into believing they are what you are searching for and littering the information superhighway. It's not unlike the bombarding of our highways with advertising signs. Googlebot and Inktomi YSlurp just don't know the difference between a legitimate site and an advertising shark. Such is the cost of free search engines.
The spam site is also a nuisance in that spammers keep an eye on expiring domains and grab them before legitimate users can get a chance. Then when users are trying to visit that old site they present a list of links for which they are paid for clicks. A key component of such spam sites are the Ads by Google. By indiscriminately pushing links onto web pages for the advertising bucks they are encouraging continued abuse of the internet with these spam sites.
With Google's continued bonding with spammers good searches are becoming more and more difficult. The irony is that their PPCs are promoting spam sites and with the spam sites showing up on searches the value of their search is being jeopardized. 22
A human generated list like The Open Directory (dmoz.com) would be the best answer to our searching problems except that there isn't enough support to keep it viable. It's too soon to tell but if hakia is fully computer-generated by search bots spam sites will also make their way into the list of pages. If they truly develop to provide intelligent results and are able to monitor the results to limit the spam then they will have my undivided devotion.