Slashdot Mirror
What if Google Had to Design For Google?
An anonymous reader writes "Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."
If Google were really designing for Google, they'd use CSS rather than font tags, and they'd wrap a big H1 around the Google logo (with appropriate alt and title tags). They'd also use lists for the... lists.
He only did the surface optimization. Missed keywords and description in the headers, didn't bold enough stuff, and didn't use H1 and H2 enough. :-)
Start a happiness pandemic
Blocked! Profanity
If people designed their websites to serve their users instead of GoogleBot, would it matter that their pagerank was a little lower?
...my company's webfilter says I can't be shown it because the site has fallen in the "tasteless and/or gross" category.
FYI.
...and had to design for Google?
Lets see... counter examples... how about searching Google for the word "shipping". What do you know, UPS and Fedex are #1 and #2, and their front pages aren't a mess of useless, Google-pleasing crap. Maybe because they are real businesses and aren't pandering some direct ship junk or get rich quick scheme.
...this article(?) was helpful in explaining to me why so many sites *do* look as disgusting as all that.
...as evidenced by my email address, for one.
It was pretty hilarious, too.
Unfortunately, this gives me one more reason to be semi-disturbed by Google's obvious dominance in the web-o-sphere...
The last page of this dude's site.
http://www.meangene.com/google/google7.html
Hey, it doesn't look half bad. I thought it would be much worse.
How about a greater level of hyperbole...
Let's see.. how about a company that ranks search results based on how much money their receive from the respective hits...
Now it looks like Yahoo. Perhaps Yahoo is trying really hard to remain relevant.
Exactly. The only people I hear constantly bickering about Googles metrics and pagerank, are those who have sites that no one would miss if they were gone tomorrow. If you really put social networking spam links on your page to up your pagerank, you're just an attention whore. That's not bad per se in a attention economy, but don't complain if I just laugh in your face if bad bad evil google sorts your petty site to the bottom of search results for "witty blog". Create something unique, needed. Like, say, a good search engine.
The tag should be "Giigle", not "Google".
How about every do what Google does and design for the USER. I know, crazy right? I mean, why rely on word of mouth that you have an amazing site that has lots of useful stuff on it when you can rely instead on poor UI design, and low quality content.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
...a site that works for your customers.
Oh. Wait. That assumes that you have some customers.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What about the millions of small businesses who have a legitimate product to sell in a competitive market? Fedex and UPS would be at the top of Google's list if their page was nothing but a white sheet with their phone number in the corner, but small company must genuinely worry about every little increase in the page ranking.
The frustrating thing is that smaller, but still legitimate, companies are often forced to do dumb shit like this because the retarded Scam Inc. type pages have already claimed most of the useful keywords, and apart from lots of expensive advertising there isn't really much else you can do to compete...
Of course, no company should base its business model on maintaining a high Google page rank, but it is frustrating when you lose customers because they Google your company's name, or some closely related phrase, to see if you're legitimate and get turned off because the first thing that pops up is spam.
Alta Vista, circa 1998, which is why I switched to Google in the first place.
Compare it to the original and dare to ask WHY google beat everyone else in the market, because its design was (still is) by far the cleanest. It is simple, it is to the point, it is what people want.
The end page looks a lot like all the other search engines out there, bloated pieces of crap, and this guy didn't even include annoying ads and popup requests to signup.
No, if google had done their original search page like this, they would have been just another search engine.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.meangene.com/google/ google_internet_search.html
Well not to be an ass, but just in case people get the wrong idea about how to do a seo url, one needs to know that:
Google sees hyphens as dividers in URLs and body text, and ignores underscores (underscore is not considered as a divider by Google).
Google can set a couple of links from high PageRanked sites and get free ads.
So, what you are saying is, that a site that is not a well-established business will have to rely on something other than free indexing by Google to get the attention it would have if it were an established. successful business in the field.
Certainly, this is true. And why shouldn't it be?
Um, maybe because UPS and FedEx are already well-known shipping companies, whose page rank for a search on "shipping" would be high regardless of what their sites looked like? But companies that aren't already well known, and want to use Google page rank in order to *get* known, do clutter up their sites in order to please Google's search engine. Search your feelings, you *know* it to be true!
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I think there are 3 real options:
1) rank by $$ paid only, you pay more, you are higher, just like the paid ads on the right side of Google. want better rankings? pay up.
2) rank by number of sites that link to you, or some metric that tries to guess how important your site is based on its content. want better rankings? convince people to link to you with little buttons and/or pay some voodoo doctor to please the GoogleBot.
3) The current system. You front the money and get exposure due to ads until your site is important enough that your don't need them anymore, and/or you play the "the link to me, I'm cool" and voodoo games.
I don't understand what the complaint with the current system is and what the proposed solution is.
You can't believe everything SEO consultants tell you. I'm not convinced all that garbage would really significantly improve their indexing. Indeed, I tend to think some of that stuff would actively *hurt* their relevancy ranking, especially the link-farm malarke -- I mean, seriously, linkshare? That just screams, "Our site doesn't have any actual content to make it relevant, so we're swapping links with other irrelevant sites so that we can pool our irrelevance and be obscure together!"
The best way to improve your ranking is to put interesting content on your site that people will want to look at, link to, tell each other about, and so forth. (Of course, what counts as "interesting" depends heavily on your target demographic.) The second best way is to make sure the search engine can actually read and index your content (that it's not, for instance, just a bunch of images without meaningful alt attributes).
Crosslinking from one part of your site to another can help, but Google *does* do that -- their main web search links to the image search, to the video search, to the news search, and so forth. And vice versa.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
On that last page under recent searches I am getting:
Recent Searches
waikiki vacation
al gore nobel prize
hillary dildo bushwhacker
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Right, so you pay for some ads. The current system also lets people play games with their content to a reasonable extent to try to get exposure for free. So who cares if someone is whining because they are too cheap to pay up to keep their pretty layout?
The last page looks like iGoogle to me.
Google, however, is not a small business, and when most people are searching for something online, they're not looking for small businesses.
The small company is probably better off paying for traditional advertising and perhaps *paying* for ad-words, rather than trying to rely on their page rank to generate business all on its own for them.
Again, if you offer a real service, page ranking is less important than usability of the web page.
So, basically, it would be Yahoo! then?
...
It seems it would be, "dogpile" but Yahoo! isn't far down the list, and strangely is a spartan search page like Google.
Interestingly, "Google" isn't even on the first page, so I guess they're not optimizing for Google. Or they figure that if you're using Google to search for search engines, you probably already know about Google...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What I'm saying is your taking my quote out of context. The OP's point was that if a company is legitamite it does not need to rely on 'clutter' methods to increase its position on Google's results. Whereas, my point was to demonstrate an example of a legitamite company that would benefit from employeeing such tactics.
99.999% of small businesses are 100% irrelevant. That they don't show up easily on Google means it's working.
You know what does make your small business show up easily on Google, even if you're totally fucking useless? Buying a goddamn advertisement!
Problem fucking solved.
Arre youu fuckingg withh mee, Brendonn?
The term you're looking for is "tragedy of the commons". Fortunately, Google can update it's bots to clear out the overgrazers from time to time.
Google already does code for google. They're the first hit.
Seriously though, this article depresses me. The unspoken sentiment is that typical websites can't survive without google. Which implies that typical websites can't survive on word of mouth, aggregator sites, and features highlighting them on good websites. I can't think of a single site that I found through google. I use google to search large sites, go to sites with awkward URLs, or find one time use references. But apparently the good sites that can survive on word of mouth are not typical any more.
It really saddens me because it reminds me of TV. Shows that can that do well via word of mouth get canceled or messed with before the audience peeks, and many of the shows that succeed do so because they are they slightly appeal to many demographics rather then being really well received by a few. What happens when the start up costs for websites go up and you need substantial ads from the get go, will there be any new great sites, that aren't flukes.
In the end I don't think sites should be designed to optimize page rank, except for maybe online retailers that compete with other online retailers. If your site is good people will link to it and praise it and it's page rank will soar.
It's not Google that ultimately sets these awful restrictive criteria; it's the end user, who is better served by a search engine that weeds out crappy pages automatically. Reminds me a while back of companies complaining about users choosing Google more than other engines, making Google a "monopoly". It's like affirmative action gone wrong.
What about the millions of small businesses who have a legitimate product to sell in a competitive market?
All of the big businesses simply out competed the "millions of little guys." It's a direct artifact of capitalism that whoever's on top can scream their name the loudest.
Am I missing something here?!
What designers are you talking about that are trying to do simple pages for their users????
From what I'm seeing so far, everybody's going for Flash-based websites, with no text to search around a page, and un-indexable pages, because of the embedded crap of Flash! And if it's not Flash, it's ActiveX From Hell. And on top of that mess, they still code for IE6, breaking almost every web-standard, and knocking on the gates of Hell!
All you seem to be focusing on is linking, and that's not how indexing gets done; Meta tags, content, image titles, ALT text.
Who ever wrote that page is clearly an idiot & has no clue how to design a website with a simple look & have ANY Search Engine Bot get it indexed.
YOU FAIL!
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Google is so good because they are good at deciding what pages matter! Leave your page as it is and fill it with content. It isn't like all of the sudden *POOF* google appeared and now we all have to conform to their model. They evolved in parallel to web pages...meaning THEY ALREADY KNOW HOW TO INDEX YOUR SHIT!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Google isn't about "getting you known",, google is about telling the user, (who initiated the search) which sites are already known.. If you want to get known, buy adwords like everyone else. Will probably cost you less than a consultant to come up with every changing google page optimization.
I don't, because having good content and using correct semantics does most of the search engine work for you. Google and the other searches eventually figure out how sites game them, which is why Google ignores meta tags and penalizes sites with hallway pages. Many other tricks are harder to detect, though... for now.
If Google was the king of search, and all others worked largely the same way, would we be developing two search-specific versions of every site? No, but amazingly that seems to be the case when browsers are considered.
If you're not developing sites for humans to use, you've missed the point of the internet. Search engines are little more than a flawed proxy. It's sad the they are seen primarily as pull-based yellowpages.
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1047/1444802676_65cf065336.jpg?v=0
Now if you search for Google on Google, they are the first result (and the first sponsored link).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Am I the only one who noticed the advertisement hidden in this otherwise uninspiring webpage? Is that something Google would have to add if they were "designing for Google"?
Insert self-referential sig here.
The final page looks like Yahoo.
I particularly liked how after all the redesign, if you tried to search for anything from the result you got a 404.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Let's see, what did he do? Create phony links to himself, create links to crap (that might be "good" search words), create a "blog" (I still think bloogle is something google should register soon, it almost begs to be a parody site) and a lot of other crap.
Bluntly? If you "have" to do that to rise in the pagerank, it's probably better if you don't rise. What is actually on the page that could remotely be interesting? Phony links? Phony references? Phony "partners"?
Do you have any CONTENT for crying out loud? That's what I care about. Who would get to this page? People who go there would immediately notice "nope, not what I'm looking for" and drive on, pissed that they wasted another click on a keyword-hogging site that's actually in no relationship to what they're actually looking for.
In short, you don't HAVE to do that to rise in the goggle ranks. The 'net is still a big space and yes, being highly ranked in Google in relevant keywords certainly helps. But if I go there and see a cluttered mess of a page, I close the page again and check the second keyword. And sooner or later you will sink in the rank, because you only have your phony links and references, while the second one on the list has "real" links, from people who enjoyed his service and linked to him.
So simply don't do that, instead, use the various ways available to promote your page. Good service and word of mouth can do quite a lot on the net. There's always some "relevant" discussion page in existance, from price comparison to microcontrollers. Go there and link to you page. But make the links relevant. Don't arbitrarily link anything just to lure people in. They will click the link, they will see it's bogus and they'll hate you. And your page. Be relevant and people will go there, maybe even next time not taking the detour through the discussion site but rather directly, they will link to you when you got good descriptions and explanations, thus increasing your Google ranking without you having to do anything.
Yes, you have to provide content to "honestly" gain Google rank. But in the long run, it's less hassle and more "relevant".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, my point is the tactics are questionably legitimate and are attempts to game the system. They aren't necessary. A company can either be good in its own right and legitimately get a good rank, or they can buy ads, or some combination. Google is neither forcing nor encouraging anyone to do the stupid things the article talks about. If people want to try to get some free/cheap exposure on the sly then that's fine, but I don't want to hear them whining about it.
Its like the people who are too cheap to rent a regular billboard and who don't have a real store, and nobody knows about them. So, they buy some cheap plastic signs and stick them at random intersections. Fine, I can live with the tactic. But, what if they start complaining about how the wind blows their little signs down, people think their business is less classy because their signs have huge letters in obnoxious colors, too many exclamation points, etc.? Should anyone care?
What if Google tried to game their own system?
I've been to one of those internet seminars where they try to tell you how to make money off of the internet. Many of you seem to think that there is some moral benefit to creating a "useful" site with good content. Not everyone is out there to create a site that will actually be useful to people. Many folks just want to make a quick dollar or two. Someone may make a site that sells some aggregated crap like ebooks or lists of on form or another. They could care less how their site looks; the most important thing is driving people to their business. Location, location, location. When you are competing with established players, you have to do what you can to gain any edge, and if that entails screwing up your site so that it looks horrible, but gets you to the number one spot in a search result, then so be it. To get to this spot is not free by any means; you have to pay just as much, if not more, to position yourself in any one spot in a search result if you are not paying for ads. But often the cost is cheaper, and to a startup business, that is a better idea. I have a friend who is a salsa teacher and who sells salsa dvds online. He has a lot of crap websites that look horrible, but which always get him to the top of the search results for certain terms. He has specifically told me that the worse a site looks, the better it sells. It's true! Site's like the faux Google site may look like crap, but the numbers are there; sites like that, which contain real content, actually do very well and make their owners a lot of money. The nicer you make a site, especially ones that sell information, and the more you doll it up, the worse it will do. This is totally counterintuitive, since I am myself a designer and web developer, but it does seem to be the case. This is not the case for sites that rely ont heir site just as a business card, but if you are trying to sell something HARD (Act now! For a limited time! Buy this product too and we will throw in more! An added bonus!) these horrible looking sites can do very well. So, the moral of the story is, don't be so cynical about these sorts of sites. They make our lives as developers and designers hard, but design is not always important. If someone wants to make a quick buck selling something and they screw up th look of their site to try to get to the top of Google's rankings, that's the way it has to be. Each time Google changes stuff around, the SEO people will find some other way around it.
http://hilldill.bigcartel.com/
Just in case you wanted a dildo with Hillary's face on it.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Fortune 50 (only 50 possibilities...)
the only one doing what they do (look for the company with products/biz model unlike any other members of the 50 list)
ridiculously long urls (could exhaustively search the list of 50 and figure out which has the worst urls, or use this criteria as a check from the selector above)
The top 500 list, remember you only have to search the first fifty:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/full_list/index.html
is to have a product or service that gets constant recognition...just like it has always been.
Demanding to be put in the number one spot is ignorant, and expecting to be their is just stupid.
The yellow pages has rules about how many A's it will allow in front of a name, why isn't anyone crying about that?
Reputation is important, as it a moderate view of any opinion of a service or product online.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They forgot to add actual, useful, original content. Who knows, maybe that would help them out?
There fixed
I haven't done anything like that to my site. I just wrote clean, minimal HTML with proper mark-up. And I end up in the top ten results for searches for properties I've done art for.
No keyword stuffing, no social link buttons, no SEO bullshit. Just clean code and quality content on a regular basis.
egypt urnash minimal art.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who know where they are going, and those who don't. The second group of people are easily engaged by the first oasis of flashing lights and bright sensations they stumble upon, and they probably bumble through a few "pay per click" turnstiles in the proces.
When I seriously looking for something, I can almost always tell from the result page synopsis which sites have rank they didn't deserve, and pass over these quickly.
Right now the ones that are killing me are the SpringerLink spams that seem to offer direct access to a full-text PDF, but you actually wind up at a coin-op with nothing more than an abstract. There are other research journal sites (I don't have the culprits at the tip of my tongue) where you can get to a page of full-text from the Google search results, but if you try to navigate to any other page once you reach that site, it demands a registration/login. But you can go back to Google and get the next page with a clever search. Call it the Elsevier bait and switch. If they didn't invent this, they probably wish they had.
That's a very strange optimization. A site makes its full-text content available to Google to attract people from the outside, but you have to pay a price to navigate the facility from the inside. Imagine a mall where every store is open to the street, but to access the arcade that connects them internally, you have to buy a membership.
I hate Google for putting [PDF] beside links to these nasty academic journal coin-ops. Like I'm going to pay $90 for a fifteen year old paper on some obscure protocol demonstrating a potential drug side effect in rats. There was a new result published this summer on "fast acting" antidepressants acting as 5-HT4 agonists. Turns out that 5-HT4 agonists are also the primary target of a class of drugs promoting GI motility in IBS patients, among which was a drug named Propulsid, later withdrawn due to possible cardiac arrhythmias. That gives the class of "fast acting" antidepressants several different spins. s/depressed/scared witless/
Google has become extremely lax about allowing the likes of JSTOR and Esevier to either mutate their presentation on referrer tag, or report something different to the Googlebot that what the end user sees. In my opinion, these bastions of intellectual shakedown are a little too rich for Google not to notice, or not to care.
Even if I wished to purchase a fifteen-year-old five page article for $90, I certainly wouldn't do so without first exhausting the information I can freely obtain. I can't count the number of times that JSTOR has tried to hit me up for a paper that the author has published freely on his own web site, which I locate a half dozen clicks further down the road. Yet Google is apparently making no effort to return the free full-text version ahead of the abstract behind lexan edition.
So far, Google has self-policed well enough that a Google-result-fixer has not yet become the number one Firefox plug-in, but I can see that day coming soon. It sure would be nice to have a plug-in to automatically substitute any coin-op JSTOR/Esevier link in the Google result set with a link to the free full-text, when that also exists just for the looking. My pain level has not quite reached the point of rolling my own.
but, but, if I search for "Google" using Google, then the first hit is Google. So why would you redesign it? :-)
SEO companies would love nothing more than for people to believe that the only way Web sites get found anymore is big, bad, mean bully Google. They pump Google as the ultimate Web bad cop, then offer to come in and save the day with their SEO tactics.
The truth is that there are plenty of ways to be found and known and to be successful on the Web besides the search engines. You won't hear that from SEOs though.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
A pair of H-tags mark the start and end of each heading element. If your document already has worthwhile text, you should put meaningful section names into properly nested heading elements. This will allow user agents, especially browsers for media types other than screen and robotic user agents operated by search engines, to discover and make use of the structure of your document. See Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: Structural Grouping to learn how to set up your clients the H-tag.
Incidentally, WCAG is probably one of the most effective SEO guides that I've ever read.
Don't you know that if you type 'google' into google, you can break the Internet?
Disclaimer: I'm the head of IT at the company I'm working for, and I have this on good authority.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
My previous employer got around 40% of its business online. We're talking multi-billion dollar turnover.
It's a travel company. When people search for 'beach holiday in thailand' on Google, they don't care whether they get our products or the competitions. Google doesn't care. Page-rank does care. It wants to give the searcher a set of results that talk about beach holidays in thailand.
This makes it very important to make the site attractive and accessible to the Google bot, and get it ranked highly. Sure, we can (and do) buy ads on the search result page. But $20/click for an ad adds up very fast, especially when the margins on the products are $10-20 in the first place. Generating traffic through page ranks has payback in the tens of millions.
Do we bicker about Google's metrics and pagerank? I wouldn't use the word 'bicker'. Does it make a significant difference to the business? Very clearly.
Are our products ones the public wants? Our retail establishments are market leaders in their own right. Does our website suck? Personally I think so, but we get more traffic than our competitors, and we sell more products. We do have the product, it is at the right price, but online the market is hyper-competitive, and pagerank matters.
Frankly, I don't give a shit about SEO, and would never pay anyone to do it. I run a few websites, ranging in size. They all have a decent search results in google. This isn't because I spent ages getting linked to and setting up google optimisations. The sites are based on their content, If the sites are interesting and people want to read them, they will find out. How did google become so popular? They were a good search, and it spread by word of mouth, to what it has become today. If you feel you have to use SEO, then your site probably isn't worth looking at in the first place. SEO=googlespam
Sigh. Google
Where are the google text ads in this "revised" google? There is so much unused page space in the final version!
I can't think of a single site that I found through google.
Most people don't care about sites, it's about single pages relevant to the query.
I'm pretty sure many visitors don't even fully understand the concept of a site, given the referer search terms of the type www term1 term2 that lead people to my site (term1 and term2 not being part of my domain). They just learned that typing stuff into Google gets them to interesting places.
I guess the choice is, do you want to pander to the lowest common denominator or do you want to do something which you believe in? Both routes are valid, and if you can find happiness and fulfillment through creating crud, or if that does not take away from finding happiness in your life, then go for it! All experiences are valid. For my part, though, I avoid visiting or buying stuff from ugly sites.
--I figure, if a creator is resonating on the level of ugly, huckster design, then it probably means s/he has no respect for me or for the products being sold, and this translates into products/services which are probably also going to be dollar store junk. No thanks. Salsa lessons from a guy who creates a public image which has no grace? Huh? Isn't dance is supposed to be all about grace? There's a rational disconnect there for me. If he was passionate about his craft, then shouldn't that passion and desire for grace infect every other portion of his life?
You couldn't pay me enough to crudify my soul and surrender my values and become cynical, and guess what? Nobody has to, because sticking to high standards earns me a good income. Cynicism is not the only way to success. In fact, I would argue that it's a misleading way, since true success depends largely on how easy it is to love yourself at the end of the day.
I can't remember where I heard this little axiom, but it's one that repeats itself to me regularly and which I have found to be true; "People who refuse to settle for less rarely have to."
-FL
Because Google isn't a tool for maintaining the status quo. It's a search engine that returns the most relevant results. At least that's what they tell us. For a search like "shipping" the top retail shippers aren't necessarily the best or most relevant matches. What's more is wikipedia should almost never be a match for a search that doesn't explicitly include phrases like "what is" or "definition" or "encyclopedia".
Actually, I'd say for a search like "shipping", the top retail shippers are a pretty good operationalization of "most relevant".
Now, if the search was "economy shipping" or "rapid shipping", that might not be the case. And, surprisingly enough, FedEx and UPS aren't the top results for either of those. Vague, generic searches may get results that are most relevant in a kind of least-common denominator sense. But then, what do you expect? Mind-reading that knows your personal, unexpressed interests and inserts them as search terms?
Why? One of the things people are most likely to be interested in when searching for a term is information about whatever that term is, and one of the most popular on-line sources for such information is often Wikipedia. The fact that you don't personally like Wikipedia doesn't make it irrelevant to the average Google user. If you expressly don't want Wikipedia results, they're easy to exclude.
They did not design (their original page) according to Altavista page rank. They did not design it accoring to Yahoo page rank. They made a clean simple interface. Why would I believe that the only way to have my site know is to design it around Google page rank?
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
I went onto Google and searched for "Search Engine" and Google didn't even show up in the results. O_o
It looks just like a Yahoo homepage...
So true. And you'll notice that Google isn't in Google's top 10 search sites.
(Of course, Microsoft Live search isn't in Microsoft's top 10, but Google is.)
No, because the purpose of a search engine is to find things relevant to what you are looking for. Anyone who actually goes to a search engine is doing so because they don't want www.fedex.com or www.ups.com. Those are simple enough that no one needs to search for them. So anyone who puts in a generic "shipping" search doesn't want those, if they did they would have just put those in the address bar on their browser.
I don't claim that wikipedia doesn't have lots of information. I claim that a generic search will never be usefully answered by a link to wikipedia. A search that shows some indication of someone trying to find out the kind of information that wikipedia contains will show that in the search terms.
http://web.archive.org/web/19970418161616/http://www7.yahoo.com/
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
> Google for the word "shipping". What do you know, UPS
> and Fedex are #1 and #2
That's nice, except for 5.7 billion people in the world
``shipping'' refers to the fleet of vessels upon the sea,
not postage.
So what your example shows is that Google is crap.
Somehow I think designing a search engine so that another search engine would rank it highly would be moot. What would be the point of searching for a search engine? What keywords would you want and why would you put them on pages?
On any website the basic concept is to make the site usable by human visitors. If you do that well then getting a decent search engine ranking isn't that hard. It may take time but eventually it'll happen. Put appropriate levels of descriptive text on every page and in your text use the keywords human visitors will be looking for. Don't put a lot of crap that doesn't benefit the user or that is difficult to access - such as putting important content inside of a Flash movie where it can only be found by waiting 15 seconds and clicking three pretty Flash buttons.
Sure, you need to make strategic links to your website. It's called advertising and is a common practice in business. My experience is that ad banners aren't very effective but will work if they are highly targeted. Low key text links tend to work better for creating casual traffic. Advertise on websites with related content or some other connection to you. While you're at it put some money into other forms of advertising such as print or radio.
There really isn't anything mysterious about getting people to your website or getting search engine placement. Bother putting things in a format human and spider visitors can both use and do a little advertising and your pretty good. Avoid spamming or doing other bad things because the majority of the time you'll just mess up and get banned by Google.
On the site I'm working on right now my current project is to go through the product database and make the descriptions more descriptive. Hardly a weird idea. Most of use don't know what a FLN is while many more of us know what a flange is. That and fixing typos such as there is no such thing as a 3.8" pipe but there are 3/8" pipes. Such minor changes make a major difference in the traffic received from search engines and in converting that traffic to buyers.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Uhm, why design a webpage for a search engine? The whole purpose of a search engine is to make it good in finding relevant pages?
If it fails with that the problem isn't with the webpage but with the search engine. Fix google instead.
> Anyone who actually goes to a search engine is doing so because they don't want www.fedex.com or www.ups.com. Those are simple enough that no one needs to search for them.
You need to meet more average Internet users (or maybe I need to meet fewer...). Their browser's home page is whatever it defaulted to when they bought the PC, and they _never_ type out URLs. If they wanted to find google, but their home page is Yahoo? They really will search for Google via Yahoo. If they want Fedex, they will search for FedEx through their home page's search engine.
Damn, is this guy sleeping with somebody from slashdot or what... What a stupid post!
Um, no. I don't think that's a valid assumption, at all. Someone who goes to a search engine may not know the URL for FedEx or UPS (yes, they have fairly obvious URLs -- that doesn't mean everyone knows them, though it does mean that once they know them they are likely, though by no means certain, to remember them.)
If someone knows they don't want fedex.com or ups.com pages and chooses to share that information with Google, Google accommodates their needs. Google's assumption -- and I'd say its a fair one -- is that queries without express restrictions or exclusions of particular sites express no preference, not the kind of "assumed exclusion" you suggest.
I claim that you are wrong, since I've done "generic searches" of the type you describe, and they have been usefully answered by links to wikipedia.
1) Relatively instant results if you know what you're doing.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually rely on the assumption that users know what they're doing?
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.