. The problem is that it would require the mass population of users/editors to both build the directory and to keep it from being overrun by spammers, griefers, trolls, etc.
I doubt that it would work as expected, it's no surprise that Wikipedia itself has become more like an oligarchy recently, especially the german version, where a relatively small number of admins has the last word always regarding "relevance". Then again, there are crowdsourcing projects out there that manage to involve the casual user by asking simple one-click yes/no questions ("is XXX correctly classified as YYY?") and the result quality, based on a majority vote of the answers, is very good.
That has been the subject of many blog posts and news items and it is why sites which care about your privacy do not use this button (they use "find us on facebook" buttons with simple HTML links instead of iframes hosted by facebook).
The first results on Google by relevance are from sellers like Dabs and Amazon, which have a very good reputation over here. On the other hand, the top Foundem results include companies I'd be reluctant to do business with. No idea how Google managed that.
Amazon will be paying through the associates program, whether dabs is paying or not I don't know, but it seems likely. The question is, does it say anywhere on Google that those companies are "relevant" because they are known to be more reputable, or does it say nothing because there are factors involved that would not seem to be objective?
Something odd must be going on for you.
I just clicked on your links. I am not located in the UK though (and not in the US either).
It's a pity web directories such as the Open Directory Project have fallen by the wayside in the mind of the general public.
Have you ever tried to get a site with, say, 1 million page views monthly (it's not much, but more than many sites listed there), listed on dmoz? The maintainers seem to have gone in hibernation mode mostly, you can wait for months for any kind of reply. No wonder it's all outdated / useless info...
But the whole complaint was debunked long ago -- Foundem is just a link farm. It has no value the should put it high in Google's ranking.
That is a bold claim, Foundem has unique content like a price history, user ratings, glossary and the way the "links" (which are actually product and pricing data together with links) are organized and grouped has its value too. People wouldn't visit price comparison sites if they didn't find a compelling reason to. Or, to put it differently, why does "Google Products" (you know, that link farm) even exist if all the linked offers there are just "links" that normal Google search could show as well?
Foundem have an interesting business model in general. It seems to revolve around Google failing at their core competency of internet search, and that feels like a really bad bet to me.
Most major price comparison sites are older than Google and much older than Google's attempts to enter that market. Their aim is not to provide general search results in niches where Google sucks, but specifically to provide a good shopping/price research experience, just as on a hotel booking site the user will see different information, presented in a different way than by searching Google. Theoretically, in the long run Google could identify such searches (or train users to search differently) and present the same kind of information / summarization to the user, but that is as much of a danger to Google (having too many different products) as it is to current competitors in these markets.
Personally, I don't want one biased company to dominate the search market, it would mean that quality suffers in the long run, as we've seen elsewhere (Office software market etc.).
Google Products is actually much better. Compare this Foundem search and the per-product pages with Google Product and its per-product pages. The Google pages offer more useful information up-front, avoid redundant duplication, and are generally better designed.
Your Google link didn't work. Yes, the product info on Google is better, but Foundem has a) better result filtering, b) a more user-oriented default sorting by price (Google sorts by "Relevance", which is silly on a per-product page and reeks of favoritism i.e. paid results first), c) pounds and not USD like Google, d) a price history, e) merchants from the UK as expected from a.co.uk site while Google has US merchants
It's no wonder that Bing and ciao.co.uk have a much smaller marketshare than Google - they're useless.
I would have no issues with it if I could believe that to be the reason, but with the facts known at this point I can't.
You're not ranked high because you're not relevant to the users' interest. 'Nuff said.
Read this first: Foundem's Google story - by the way, I had to use Yahoo to get this link (first hit for "google foundem story", nowhere in sight when using Google).
Regarding the duplicated content excuse Google is using: Foundem certainly contains product listings from other sites, but heavily modified (just like any price comparison site) and presented in a way that makes them differ enough, just like (or even more than) most news sites copying reuters press releases or blogs linking to other articles. You will find that this is also true for Google Products, which is strangely not suffering from "duplicated content" problems. Generally, many shops as well as shopping sites use identical product names and descriptions derived from distributors' info or companies like cnet content solutions, so it's just a poor excuse that shows Google's true colors...
Sorry to say, but that article was written by a clueless moron who just argues that any price comparison site must fail at SEO, which a) is obviously wrong and b) would mean that Google Products would also never warrant a top position since all its content is as problematic as the author wants to make us believe Foundem's is.
young kids should run around hurting themselves so that they learn not to do certain things later in life when they don't heal as easily
That would suggest letting them surf the web, preferably with MSIE, so they can be responsible Internet users later on. There's far too many adults around who waste everyone's time and money at their workplace with getting their PCs infected with malware and sending "funny" chain emails to everyone.
Facebook's selling point was its exclusivity - you originally joined Facebook because only college kids were on it, and no one else. You stayed on it for the clean interface.
Hardly. Facebook's selling point was and still is that it enforces lack of privacy for other people you are interested in and for yourself, when you see a benefit in it (or an illusion thereof). Diaspora's selling point seems to be a lot of privacy and minimum exposure for yourself, which does not sound like it'll be a strong selling point for a "social network". To put it differently, Facebook is for stalking people who don't care (enough) about privacy. Diaspora only has people who care about privacy, so what's there to look at?
For me, the best alternative to Facebook would be something that works in exactly the same way from the user's point of view but without providing arbitrary access to the service provider and 3rd parties, like Facebook according to rumors. A good basis for implementing something like this would be wuala, it has all the access levels (public, private, friends only) and security mesures required, as well as redundancy. It would only require a frontend that collects new stuff from your friends' shares and posts to your appropriate share.
The only measure which has successfully prevented a terrorist attack since the '01 hijackings is the increased vigilance and response of the flying public.
Arguably, this is also due to the security theater provided by the TSA: it makes people feel at risk.
I have serious doubts that MS would be interested in patents other than those with potential to hurt Linux (or even OSX). Was Novell known to own any other patents of significant importance to Microsoft? If they could get their hands on the SCO stuff wouldn't they try very hard? For me, there is no other reasonable explanation for Microsoft getting involved at all and none has been published anywhere as far as I can tell.
So yes, expect a new series of boring attacks on Linux/Android (and perhaps OSX) by Microsoft.
So corrupt officials who divert public funds to their friends/partners have to split those transactions up into sub-£25k chunks? That's almost as funny as the court opening Austria's "Mr. presumably innocent"'s bank accounts but only those in Austria while anyone with money and half a brain has accounts in Switzerland, Liechtenstein etc.... (German, sorry);-)
Having to pay Apple $100m annually for the search box is nothing, even though it is probably more than Mozilla gets. Google revenues are what, $28b annually? How much of that is due to being the default search engine in major browsers? They would probably pay 10 times as much if they were asked to, although perhaps not for the iPhone and iPad at this point...
I don't want to step on any toes, but mixpanel does not seem to have the kind of traffic or growth that would call for dramatic measures (or articles). It looks like their application must be very I/O-intensive and most, if not all commercial clouds would be bad/limiting for them (does any provider give you numbers comparable to your own 10gbe or IB infrastructure without virtualization?). Sure, they can provide some room for growth on demand, but if it doesn't fit your application because you need I/O both throughput and low latency, you might still want to look at buying your own hardware.
You'll have different problems going that way, from rack temperatures to flakey RAMs, but it's much more flexible and a lot cheaper (in our case, the cost is somewhere around 15-20% of what we'd pay for EC2 including traffic over the past 5 years, as of last year or so when I bothered doing a comparison). Plus you don't need to write dramatic articles when you find out along the way that you aren't getting what you need. And you get to play with interesting hardware, but I realize that not everyone likes that.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
That would make him a Martyr... The US government does not want that.
They don't care. They kill people every day.
. The problem is that it would require the mass population of users/editors to both build the directory and to keep it from being overrun by spammers, griefers, trolls, etc.
I doubt that it would work as expected, it's no surprise that Wikipedia itself has become more like an oligarchy recently, especially the german version, where a relatively small number of admins has the last word always regarding "relevance". Then again, there are crowdsourcing projects out there that manage to involve the casual user by asking simple one-click yes/no questions ("is XXX correctly classified as YYY?") and the result quality, based on a majority vote of the answers, is very good.
Is there a law that says search engines must be impartial?
No, but there are laws that can probably be invoked when someone claims to be impartial and isn't ...
That has been the subject of many blog posts and news items and it is why sites which care about your privacy do not use this button (they use "find us on facebook" buttons with simple HTML links instead of iframes hosted by facebook).
The first results on Google by relevance are from sellers like Dabs and Amazon, which have a very good reputation over here. On the other hand, the top Foundem results include companies I'd be reluctant to do business with. No idea how Google managed that.
Amazon will be paying through the associates program, whether dabs is paying or not I don't know, but it seems likely. The question is, does it say anywhere on Google that those companies are "relevant" because they are known to be more reputable, or does it say nothing because there are factors involved that would not seem to be objective?
Something odd must be going on for you.
I just clicked on your links. I am not located in the UK though (and not in the US either).
It's a pity web directories such as the Open Directory Project have fallen by the wayside in the mind of the general public.
Have you ever tried to get a site with, say, 1 million page views monthly (it's not much, but more than many sites listed there), listed on dmoz? The maintainers seem to have gone in hibernation mode mostly, you can wait for months for any kind of reply. No wonder it's all outdated / useless info ...
But the whole complaint was debunked long ago -- Foundem is just a link farm. It has no value the should put it high in Google's ranking.
That is a bold claim, Foundem has unique content like a price history, user ratings, glossary and the way the "links" (which are actually product and pricing data together with links) are organized and grouped has its value too. People wouldn't visit price comparison sites if they didn't find a compelling reason to. Or, to put it differently, why does "Google Products" (you know, that link farm) even exist if all the linked offers there are just "links" that normal Google search could show as well?
Foundem have an interesting business model in general. It seems to revolve around Google failing at their core competency of internet search, and that feels like a really bad bet to me.
Most major price comparison sites are older than Google and much older than Google's attempts to enter that market. Their aim is not to provide general search results in niches where Google sucks, but specifically to provide a good shopping/price research experience, just as on a hotel booking site the user will see different information, presented in a different way than by searching Google. Theoretically, in the long run Google could identify such searches (or train users to search differently) and present the same kind of information / summarization to the user, but that is as much of a danger to Google (having too many different products) as it is to current competitors in these markets.
Personally, I don't want one biased company to dominate the search market, it would mean that quality suffers in the long run, as we've seen elsewhere (Office software market etc.).
Google Products is actually much better. Compare this Foundem search and the per-product pages with Google Product and its per-product pages. The Google pages offer more useful information up-front, avoid redundant duplication, and are generally better designed.
Your Google link didn't work. Yes, the product info on Google is better, but Foundem has a) better result filtering, b) a more user-oriented default sorting by price (Google sorts by "Relevance", which is silly on a per-product page and reeks of favoritism i.e. paid results first), c) pounds and not USD like Google, d) a price history, e) merchants from the UK as expected from a .co.uk site while Google has US merchants
It's no wonder that Bing and ciao.co.uk have a much smaller marketshare than Google - they're useless.
I would have no issues with it if I could believe that to be the reason, but with the facts known at this point I can't.
I must indeed have missed that. Could you point me to some reputable source that is qualified to say so and actually does that? Thank you.
You're not ranked high because you're not relevant to the users' interest. 'Nuff said.
Read this first: Foundem's Google story - by the way, I had to use Yahoo to get this link (first hit for "google foundem story", nowhere in sight when using Google).
Regarding the duplicated content excuse Google is using: Foundem certainly contains product listings from other sites, but heavily modified (just like any price comparison site) and presented in a way that makes them differ enough, just like (or even more than) most news sites copying reuters press releases or blogs linking to other articles. You will find that this is also true for Google Products, which is strangely not suffering from "duplicated content" problems. Generally, many shops as well as shopping sites use identical product names and descriptions derived from distributors' info or companies like cnet content solutions, so it's just a poor excuse that shows Google's true colors...
As to the reason their own services are ranked high? Of all, surely Google knows how to optimize their pages for Googles page ranking algorithms!
You must have missed this article: Hard-coded Bias in Google Search Results.
Foundem is a case study in SEO fail
Sorry to say, but that article was written by a clueless moron who just argues that any price comparison site must fail at SEO, which a) is obviously wrong and b) would mean that Google Products would also never warrant a top position since all its content is as problematic as the author wants to make us believe Foundem's is.
young kids should run around hurting themselves so that they learn not to do certain things later in life when they don't heal as easily
That would suggest letting them surf the web, preferably with MSIE, so they can be responsible Internet users later on. There's far too many adults around who waste everyone's time and money at their workplace with getting their PCs infected with malware and sending "funny" chain emails to everyone.
People here are all talk
Wait till you meet some 4chan folks, some of whom are probably reading this right now.
Please, I'd like to use this on our web servers too... :-P
... the pen(cil) is mightier than the sword after all.
Facebook's selling point was its exclusivity - you originally joined Facebook because only college kids were on it, and no one else. You stayed on it for the clean interface.
Hardly. Facebook's selling point was and still is that it enforces lack of privacy for other people you are interested in and for yourself, when you see a benefit in it (or an illusion thereof). Diaspora's selling point seems to be a lot of privacy and minimum exposure for yourself, which does not sound like it'll be a strong selling point for a "social network". To put it differently, Facebook is for stalking people who don't care (enough) about privacy. Diaspora only has people who care about privacy, so what's there to look at?
For me, the best alternative to Facebook would be something that works in exactly the same way from the user's point of view but without providing arbitrary access to the service provider and 3rd parties, like Facebook according to rumors. A good basis for implementing something like this would be wuala, it has all the access levels (public, private, friends only) and security mesures required, as well as redundancy. It would only require a frontend that collects new stuff from your friends' shares and posts to your appropriate share.
The only measure which has successfully prevented a terrorist attack since the '01 hijackings is the increased vigilance and response of the flying public.
Arguably, this is also due to the security theater provided by the TSA: it makes people feel at risk.
I have serious doubts that MS would be interested in patents other than those with potential to hurt Linux (or even OSX). Was Novell known to own any other patents of significant importance to Microsoft? If they could get their hands on the SCO stuff wouldn't they try very hard? For me, there is no other reasonable explanation for Microsoft getting involved at all and none has been published anywhere as far as I can tell.
So yes, expect a new series of boring attacks on Linux/Android (and perhaps OSX) by Microsoft.
Well that puts my mind at ease now. ;-)
So corrupt officials who divert public funds to their friends/partners have to split those transactions up into sub-£25k chunks? That's almost as funny as the court opening Austria's "Mr. presumably innocent"'s bank accounts but only those in Austria while anyone with money and half a brain has accounts in Switzerland, Liechtenstein etc. ... (German, sorry) ;-)
Having to pay Apple $100m annually for the search box is nothing, even though it is probably more than Mozilla gets. Google revenues are what, $28b annually? How much of that is due to being the default search engine in major browsers? They would probably pay 10 times as much if they were asked to, although perhaps not for the iPhone and iPad at this point ...
A free word processor (GPL) that aims to support Microsoft Word documents: Download
I don't want to step on any toes, but mixpanel does not seem to have the kind of traffic or growth that would call for dramatic measures (or articles). It looks like their application must be very I/O-intensive and most, if not all commercial clouds would be bad/limiting for them (does any provider give you numbers comparable to your own 10gbe or IB infrastructure without virtualization?). Sure, they can provide some room for growth on demand, but if it doesn't fit your application because you need I/O both throughput and low latency, you might still want to look at buying your own hardware.
You'll have different problems going that way, from rack temperatures to flakey RAMs, but it's much more flexible and a lot cheaper (in our case, the cost is somewhere around 15-20% of what we'd pay for EC2 including traffic over the past 5 years, as of last year or so when I bothered doing a comparison). Plus you don't need to write dramatic articles when you find out along the way that you aren't getting what you need. And you get to play with interesting hardware, but I realize that not everyone likes that. ;-)