Slashdot Mirror
Google's Weakness, AltaVista's Strength
Some people love the results they get at Google, others are often disappointed. To a large extent, both the pluses and the minuses derive from Google's ranking system, which (as the folks at Google explain www.google.com/technology) depends largely on the number links to a particular page and the relevance of the content on those linking pages to the content on the target page, and the quality of the pages doing the linking.
Thanks to that complex and brilliant system, over time, the best pages often rise to the top of search lists. But that takes time -- a lot of time.
It works great for old, established sites to which many other old, established sites have linked. (It works great for my site :-) www.samizdat.com ). But new sites, regardless of the quality of their content, get short shrift. It takes 2-3 months for the new pages to get into the Google index. Then it takes time -- perhaps years -- for other "important" sites to discover the new site and link to it; and then months more for the new versions of those pages with those new links to get into the Google index.
So if I'm looking for content that is likely to have been on the Internet for a year or more, Google is great. But if I'm looking for fresh content, I'll go elsewhere.
For me, for years "elsewhere" meant AltaVista -- for two reasons. AltaVista used to add new pages to its index, for free, within two days of submission, while other search engines typically took weeks or even months. That meant they had the freshest content. In addition, AltaVista provided you with a set of very precise commands that couldn't be matched anywhere else.
Over the last year, as AltaVista has struggled to become profitable, they have destroyed their beautiful free submission process, trying to force Web sites to pay for submission. Free submissions (which typically come from the kinds of content-rich sites that I'm interested in) now seem to take three months or more -- no better than the other search engines and often worse.
Fortunately, the powerful commands remain -- for instance, the ability to exclude as well as include terms in your query. AltaVista lets you use minus signs and plus signs to indicate what you really don't want and what you do want. And for some specialized searches the exclusion is essential.
For instance, say you want to know what Web pages outside of your own site have links to your pages. At Google, I can do a search for link:samizdat.com or get the same results by going to their "Advanced" search and using their "page specific search" to find pages that link to a particular page. But my results are then littered with pages from my own site -- information I don't need and don't want. At AltaVista, I can search for +link:samizdat.com -host:samizdat.com and get exactly what I want -- finding out who thinks enough of my pages to have linked to me without my having contacted them: a valuable list of well-wishers and potential partners.
Similarly, Google lets me restrict a search to a particular Web site. For instance, if I include in my query the term site:samizdat.com or in Advanced search under Domains I choose to restrict the search to that domain, Yes, I get results only from that site. But to use that command, I need to have additional query terms: site:samizdat.com alone generates no results.
At AltaVista, however, I can search for host:samizdat.com and get a complete list of all the pages at my site that are in the AltaVista index. Or I can search for url:samizdat.com/isyn and get a list of all the pages in that directory at my site are in the AltaVista index. Or I can search for url:samizdat.com/consult.html to see if that particular page is in the index.
In other words, AltaVista provides a higher level of precision and the ability to get information that is particularly valuable to people in charge of Web sites and Web-based marketing projects. And if they'd just fix their free submission process and provide the service they used to, they'd kick Google's ass for searches for current information.
P.S. -- The folks at Google are very proud that their system defies human tampering. In fact, what they've done is encouraged the development of bizarre business models structured to take advantage of their link-based ranking system. For instance, Webseed Publishing now has over 1000 sites, all with different domain names. These content-rich sites are each run by different dedicated individuals. (I'm one of them :-) In many cases, the content deserves high rankings for its quality. You might wonder why the umbrella business for all these sites bothers to maintain over a thousand different domain names, when it would be far simpler and cheaper to have them as directories under a single domain. But because the domains are different, the many thousands of links these sites have to one another all count toward the automated calculation of their popularity and quality at Google, giving them all a boost in the rankings and hence bringing Webseed more traffic and hence more revenue.
P.P.S. -- AltaVista appears to be making a comeback. Six years ago, when I was in the Internet Business Group at Digital and Digital owned AltaVista, about a third of the traffic to my Web site came by way of AltaVista. Whenever AltaVista had a glitch, I saw it immediately in my traffic stats. In fact, I sometimes was able to alert the engineers at AltaVista about problems before they had noticed them themselves. Over the years, due to increased competition from other search engines and also due to the business folks at AltaVista making bad decisions and jettisoning great capabilities/services (like 2-day free submissions, their affiliate program, LiveTopics, and newsgroup search), the number of people finding my pages by way of AltaVista plummeted. By January 2002, only 1% of my traffic was coming by way of AltaVista, despite the fact that as a long-standing fan and also as co-author of the book The AltaVista Search Revolution, I had lots of information about AltaVista at my site. I was actually getting twice as much traffic from the International Atomic Energy Agency (part of the UN), when I had no information at all related to atomic energy. But in recent weeks the traffic from AltaVista has climbed sharply. It now amounts to 6% of my total. I wish I knew why that was happening. In any case, I hope that trend continues.
Clay Henry
He got real big on burgers and fries!
Now he's down to a smaller size!
may I respond as fast as Google with a first post?
Good results
First, we have the second quarter fiscal 2002 results, released last week. These were actually really quite good. VA has reduced its cash burn to $6.1m/quarter this is not only a massive fall from the hardware services days of a >$30m cash burn, but is substantially below the target of $8m/quarter which VA announced at the time of quitting the hardware business. Having left the hardware and consulting businesses, VA was concentrating on selling its main software product, Sourceforge 3.0, and had made a number of new sales to blue-chip customers such as Stanford Universty and Pfizer. We had a few problems with their statement in the conference call and the press release that they had "$61m in cash and marketable securities" which is true, but highly misleading as to their actual financial position as they also have current liabilities of $18m (ie; they need this much to pay bills falling due in the next six months, so the actual cash available to burn is more like $43m), and we regard their description of the redundancy payments and lease cancellation fees which make up their restructuring costs as "non cash items" as actively ludicrous, but this is nit-picking; the facts as of a couple of weeks ago appeared to be that VA Software was on the raspberry road to profitability.
But .
Then we got this little bombshell; Slashdot, jewel in the crown of VA Software's OSDN network of Open Source websites, is moving to a pay subscriptions model a la Salon. Well, perhaps that's being a little bit too harsh; Slashdot isn't doing the full reader reduction exercise of making you pay for the only content you came to read, but it is going to be having "more intrusive" ads (by which I think we mean expanded banners and skyscrapers surely Slashdot wouldn't dare to go down the route of pop-ups or interstitials, would they? WOULD THEY? AARRGH!), and you'll be able to view slashdot without these ads at the bargain subscription rate of $5 per thousand pages. Obviously, this caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the assorted slashbots (2275 comments so far, nearly a third as many as adequacy.org's most popular article), but we can't help thinking that they're missing the point. Nobody, least of all VA, thinks that there will be material revenue opportunities from the subscription model; all this is, is a figleaf designed to allow Slashdot to accept pop-up X10 ads while giving its editors hobbyists Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, a lightning conductor of "well, why don't you subscribe?" to deal with the floods of threatening email they are likely to receive.
So fair enough. But when we read the actual announcement on Slashdot, we at adequacy.org got worried. When we think we're looking at a company which is on the right track, we don't like to see senior staff at its only profitable business unit making statements like:
" The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer"
or
" We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate. But we do need support from you if we are to continue."
What the hell? Slashdot was known to be profitable and cash positive when taken over by Andover.net in 1999. Andover.net was known to be profitable and cash-positive when taken over by VA Linux in 2000. The OSDN group of sites was, according to the 2Q02 results conference call, the source of more or less all the revenue generated by VA Software. And now we're being told that the ad market is so precarious that the VA cash pile is likely to be burnt up imminently? What gives? Quite apart from anything, statements like "we won't be around much longer" are Forward Looking Statements. Companies with publicly traded securities outstanding should not be making forward looking statements outside of the context of a scheduled conference call or an announcement to the general public under Regulation FD. It is, quite simply, not good enough for Rob Malda to be making this kind of wild assertion about the trading conditions faced by the key media property in the only profitable division of VA Software, ad hoc and without any kind of "safe harbor" statement. We don't know whether or not this announcement was technically in breach of Section 21 (E) of the Securities Exchange Act 1934, but we do know that well-managed companies with competently run press office and investor relations functions don't leak rumors in this kind of way.
Adequacy investigates
When we at adequacy.org witness an informational cluster-fuck like this in the making, we want to dig and delve, for the benefit of you our readers. We're about to make a few fairly controversial statements in this report, and we'd like you to take the following on trust: all the statements we make below which are in bold face can be sourced to a prominent (as in, you'd recognise the name if we told you) employee of Slashdot. We at adequacy don't want to cost anyone their job, so we'll make the following statement:
Ok, here's the dirtSourceforge is not profitable and looks like it never will be. According to our source, "it's a giant vacuum". And this seems about right to us. The recent conference call with VA Chief Executive Larry "Eleven Million Dollar Man" (that's how much VA stock he's sold for cash since the float) Augustin was full of the joys of Sourceforge "Enterprise Edition" 3.0, a "proprietary" version of the popular Open Source collaborative software development tool. Indeed, in response to a question, VA's Chairman and Chief Executive told the world that VA Software (a company which, according to its CFO made "substantially all" of its revenue from the online advertising of the OSDN) was "a company in the enterprise software market". Much was made of the fact that new sales had been made to Stanford and Pfizer, two new key clients. But when you try to pin down these sales to hard revenue numbers, it kind of drifts away. The hard fact is that Sourceforge charges $1000 per seat license (there are apparently issues relating to revenue recognition over the term of the long-term licensing contracts which VA is trying to sll, but $1K was the hard number given at the conference call). That means that, before VA Software can be considered to be mainly a software company, it needs to be selling 5000 seats worth of Sourceforge per quarter (generating $5m of revenue, roughly the same as OSDN's revenue). How close is it now to that goal?
Not close. Although the reference implementation of Sourceforge; the licensing level at which it starts to generate positive RoI for its customers, is estimated to be 120 seats, the vast majority of its current customer base are installing it on trial implementations of 30 seats to see if it's any good. Two or three big sales of Sourceforge might make a quarter of a million bucks at the outside; Sourceforge revenue for 2Q02 might possibly be as low as $60,000. Since Sourceforge 3.1, with better integration with other tools and added functionality is on the way, we can't see anyone springing for a full installation of 3.0, meaning that sales are at the mercy of the development schedule. In any case, we're not sure why anyone would buy 3.0; as far as we can tell, the main advantage over the Open Source version is that you get to use Oracle rather than PostGreSQL as a back end, which shouldn't be too terribly hard an alteration to make in-house given that the source code for the biggest existing implementation of Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net) is available.
So, on the basis of publicly verifiable facts, our source appears to know what he's talking about.
OSDN is run tightly; VA as a whole is not. This is more or less a direct quote from our source, and we believe it. OSDN, for all its expensive branding and new name, is the business of Andover.net, which was always the poor man's CMG, or Ziff-Davis for the technologically literate. Which is to say, a bunch of guys who knew how to sell ads for computer stuff. They're still good. Let's consider the following:
Again from the conference call, we learn that in 2Q02, Intel accounted for 20% of total revenues. That's (cue drum roll, Dr Evil voice) one million dollars! Did they buy a thousand Sourceforge seats? To put it bluntly, no. They spent this on advertising
You can't spend one million dollars on advertising
At any reasonable CPM rate (or indeed, at OSDN's quoted rates for "selfserve" ads recently posted, one million dollars would buy you 250 million ad impressions. According to the OSDN advertising screen, they serve 120 million page views a month. So, by this standard, roughly two out of every three ads on OSDN during the second quarter of fiscal 2002 would have been ads for Intel. I have to tell you, and every regular viewer of Slashdot will agree, that they weren't.
Slashdot is notorious for running ads for thinkgeek tshirts, other OSDN sites and caffeinated mints, but surprisingly few ads for the high-end server gear which is the unique selling point of OSDN to its advertiser base. And slashdot accounts for an awful lot of those 120 million pages. Specifically, according to figures given in in Malda's statement, Slashdot has "one third of a million visitors per day", and the median visitor generates ten pageviews (we guesstimate this from the statement that, at a subscription rate of $5 per 1000 pages without ads, "82% of our readers could view slashdot for a year for $20", ie, 4000 pages per year). That means that over a quarter, just about 90 million of OSDN's 120 million pages are accounted for by Slashdot. So if Intel has spent One Million Dollars on OSDN advertising without making a material impact on slashdot, then something pretty strange has gone on.
Here's our guess. Intel is the sponsor of the "Large Linux Installation Foundry" on sourceforge.net. What's been going on here is "narrowcasting" Intel isn't so much interested in serving 250 million pages to random Slashbots, but is more interested in serving about 400 pages over the quarter to a group of people possibly as small as nine or ten, who were making the decision in 2Q02 about which technology provider they would be going for in a large Linux installation. It is not at all unknown for big ticket computer salesmen to drop a seven-figure check in promotions if they're hoping to land a nine-figure contract. It's also not impossible that the sponsorship of Sourceforge Large Linux Installations during 2Q02 was the subject of a bidding war between to rivals over the same large contract. We can't prove this, but we're pretty sure that something of this sort happened (if there are any more disgruntled VA employees out there, we'd love to know if we were right). In any case, it's not what you might call "high-quality income"; although VA hope to continue doing business with Intel, this is a big chunk of revenue to be dependent on one piece of marketing whim.
Slashdot could be sold to another media organisation. We had to read between the lines to get to this one, and it's probably not fair to pin it on our source, but he certainly entertained our speculation on the subject. And the interesting thing is that, with the information we were able to glean about the decomposition of 2Q earnings, Slashdot doesn't look like the cash cow for VA that we thought it might be. Out of the $5m revenue of VA Software, we can take out approximately $750K of interest income on the cash balance and maybe $200K for Sourceforge, meaning that the Intel contract accounts for roughly a quarter of the operating income of OSDN. From the pagecount, we know that Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the pageviews (and thus roughly three quarters of the bandwidth costs); to assume that it generates three quarters of the revenue would be tantamount to assuming that the other OSDN sites make next to zero revenue. Which is a crazy assumption, particularly given the intangible benefit to VA Software of having sourceforge.net as a promotional device for Sourceforge Enterprise Edition. And if Slashdot accounts for three quarters of the costs and less than three quarters of the revenues, it's a dog in the OSDN portfolio, not a star or a cash cow.
So, why not sell it? Although Slashdot may be a drain on the average profitability of OSDN, it probably breaks even, and in the world of magazine publishing, that's not bad. Publishing companies know that profitability has to be measured across a portfolio of magazines, not unit by unit, and it's often worth your while publishing a loss-making Talk Magazine for a while for the touch of stardust glamour it adds to a lucrative (but potentially rather prosaic) Conde Nast Traveller. Slashdot would be a perfect "hood ornament" for a profitable stable of computer magazines, dragging the kids in while they were in college and then cross-promoting them onto other titles by the time they had reached a saleable demographic. And all this could be done without compromising its "editorial integrity", which is something usually respected in the media world, though not so much in the software publishing world ("Andover.net had all sorts of evil plans for Slashdot", our source reveals).
Bottom line: If Larry Augustin wants to claim to be running a company in the enterprise software business, it's time for him to walk the talk. Let's see some divestment of non-core assets like Slashdot. Otherwise, we ought to be facing facts and reminding ourselves that the company which used to be "VA Linux" and is now "VA Software" has always been "VA Media". It's a publishing company, and ought to be managed as one. If that means getting rid of Eleven Million Dollar Larry and getting a graduate of the Si Mewhouse academy, then so be it.
Why bother.
Those new big fat ads really are just slapped in there like a fat man's shit after a Chili Festival.. the text doesn't even flow around them. Shit man, Slashdot needs to hire some desktop publishers or something.
More trite crap from JonKa.... timothy?!?!?
;-)
Sorry, it was a "Features" force of habit. Quit confusing us tim!!
That is not only immoral, but jsut downright sick. Keep your mind our of the gutter and out of this forum the next time you feel like saying something like this.
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
insert this into your hosts file...
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
No one actually wants ads from doubleclick any way, right?
--FortKnox
Allow me to explain.
Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.
What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.
Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.
More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.
It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.
It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.
Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!
One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.
Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.
I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.
Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.
Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.
Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.
Why bother.
What if all the altavista and google links
used IP addresses rather than DNS names. Then
we wouldn't need DNS any more.
-- ac
also insert:
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
I like windows better because the name is better and the windows it gives to me are very clean looking. All the other operating systems seem too complex to me.
Mod me up to +4 now, please.
Read all about it right here!
How did you know that was my favorite show? Can you read my mind as well?
"We have a vast coalition of nations to lend
their manpower to the war".
"Men going cave to cave".
"I think we're in good shape; if not, I'll
address the nation".
Wow, I feel better already. I won't have
to activate my basement bunker.
Funny, I have never heard NATO seen September.