For a few months I’ve been playing with some of the new”social” search tools where user input rather than algorithms determine the rankings and some of the content. Most notable of these are Digg.com and Del.ico.us but also rising are reddit.com, wink.com, and others.

I’m NOT a frequent user of these so I’m really in NO great position to comment on them …. but I will anyway….

Overall I’m underwhelmed with the actual tools. Theoretically I see this added user input as great, but using them seems to yield superficial (spend a few minutes watching “DIGG SPY” articles scroll along your screen to see what I mean) and inadequate results.

CAVEAT – I have not put in a lot of time researching with these vs Google. Frankly, my early results just didn’t show enough promise to continue.

Using Digg.com and delicio.us I’m just not getting a “much better” list of things than with a faster and easier Google or Yahoo or MSN search. I certainly think the concept of democratic user selection and getting out from under the restraints of the Google algorithm are really profound, so I wonder if it’ll be a hybridized search, perhaps one that Yahoo invents now that they bought del.icio.us, that sets new standards.

As blogs begin to replace websites, spread like fire, and pump millions of pages of new content online daily we need systems that can sort and rank this content almost in real time. Google, as well as the other big search engines, fail this test although Google does seem to index blogger (and other blog?) content much, much faster than new website content. But Digg is sorting these articles at the speed of rumor and innuendo, which as we all know is *pretty damn fast*. This brushfire style of ranking leads to excitement but also problems when the rumors or story are false or questionable as OReilly writer Steve Mallett learned the hard way last week.

So, my jury is still out, but I’m not convinced regular folks will find will find del.icio.us all that tasty or dig digg as much as needed to keep all the big buzz going.

Most travel sites, especially official ones, are already in existence and therefore don’t face the challenges that a new site has simply getting into the Google index. It’s currently easier to get into MSN and Yahoo, but in general if you’ve come to the game this late with a travel site you may want to reconsider your options, associate with existing sites, or take over an old travel site.

* Official information, in my opinion, is valued more highly by search. Most SEOs think that pages from .edu domains are given preference, and I think there are algorithmic benefits to being an “official” travel site for a state, region, or country. This may be primarily due to more links and references out in the web.

* If you are an official travel site you should seek to have all members or other sites affiliated with you link to your site. One good approach, for example, is to create or use an existing “request for travel guide” page and send out linking code to your members or associates for their sites. They can thus offer a printed guide via your site and you obtain more leads and more links.

* Stop wasting so much on print, TV, and other offline advertising! The return on pay per click advertising is likely five to ten times what you consider acceptable ROI for your print campaigns. Most (all?) destinations would benefit from completely reversing their online and print advertising budgets. The caveat is that you should bid on a VERY high number of terms – as many as tens or even hundreds of thousands – to optimize the ROI of your PPC (pay per click) campaigns. More about this in future posts.

* An excellent ranking roundup from Randfish’s blog SEOMOZ

In some ways SEO is a lot simpler than most people think. As search engines have improved, SEO has become more intuitive, simply making sure you write information well suited to the topic. Despite this positive trend, search for travel remains of questionable value, increasingly leading to booking sites when you want information sites and (less frequently) the opposite.

Here are some very basic but fundamental ideas on how to optimize a site so it can gain it’s appropriate rank in the search engines.

Overall this is a good guiding principle (write for the users), but it’s also important to make sure your pages conform to the broadly accepted “search friendly” structures below plus what you’ll read at the Google webmaster guidelines.

* Create real, original, and helpful content.

* Make sure the important words that represent the content of the page, the “keywords”, are used fairly often on the page, appropriately, and in context. You can actually ruin a page’s rank by “keyword stuffing” which is using important text too often. I suggest as a good very general rule to use the keywords slightly more (I’d suggest two times more) than you would in your normal writing.

* When naming pages use URLs that correspond to the subject of the page. e.g. a page about “Google in China” could be named “google-in-china.htm” or china-google.htm. Most SEOs recommend separation of words with hyphens over underscores but it’s likely they are equivalent to most algorithms.

* Work to obtain as many “in bound links” to your site as you can. Buying links is no longer a good technique and even trading with other sites appears to be of questionable value. Ideally your site or article will be SO GOOD others will link to you. Yes, this is a VERY tough part of the game.

* Work to have the “anchor text”, that is the linking text, from those inbound links match the keyword of the page it’s linking to. e.g. the hyperlink to this article should look something like the following link: Travel SEO

* The TITLE TAG of the page should also reflect the important keywords. e.g. The title of a page about travelling to Nanjing China should be something like “Nanjing China Travel”

There are few “magic bullets” in SEO unless you’ve screwed up a technical item or do a really bad thing, get a penalty, and then don’t understand the reinclusion process. More on those later.

In fact search engines have become so concerned about manipulations of their algorithms (search routines) that in my opinion the best SEO is now done internally by subject experts and NOT by hiring fancy self annointed “experts”.

In fact I have a GREAT case study from my own company showing how expert SEOs are not of much (any!) help even with fairly substantial time and money, but more on my very interesting KeywordRanking.com experiment and experiences soon.

There are many ways to address the deficiencies with search engines, all of which are struggling with the onslaught of spam and manipulations of their algorithms (search routines).

One approach to “new search” that is catching on….like wildfire…. is letting the community of internet users rank, write, submit, and comment on content.

The best example in the technology sector is http://www.DIGG.com which has gone from obscurity to a site with over 500,000 daily visits. Recent capital from the Omidyar’s of EBAY fame will make Digg a household name very soon.

A similar (copycat?) idea is http://www.WINK.com which is actually taking input from Digg and other “user review” sites to create a sort of metaDIGG. I’m wondering if Wink’s bit off a bit too much here, thinking that niche searches and communities are where the web is heading rather than global search tools.

If true than what are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves going to do when people stop using them?

Poor guys. I urge you to send donations to their CEOs so they can feed their kids next year.

http://del.icio.us
http://www.digg.com
http://www.wink.com

Jeremy Zawodny said…

And http://reddit.com/ too.

Jeremy is always coming up with provocative notions about the way the evolving web is changing things … and fast. I hope he is right that we are on the verge of a new publishing paradigm that falls largely out of control of the “big guys”. He’s lucky and wins either way with one of the top tech blogs in the world OR as a Yahoo guy.

It’s certainly true that we are not yet close to “great” information environments for various groups of humans.

Forums were becoming great as niche interest sites, but many have become crap now that the smart people all went off blogging.

Blogs have helped to allow more of a focus on good thinkers thinking, but even good blogging is one sided, often superficial and fairly unstructured, and rarely “user centric”.

Websites are structured and often info rich but (I certainly include my own sites) working way too hard to please Google, & Yahoo & revenue sources. Money is definitely trumping quality on the web in a HUGE way, I think far more than most users realize. *Most* websites exist to turn a buck, and even great hobby sites are often co-opted by the profit motive. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s certainly makes them less inclined to focus on what a user will NEED vs what a user will BUY.

Where are all the users in all this mess?

Surfing for something that isn’t there yet.

A lot of concern over this item at boing-boing suggesting Wal Mart is racist due to a recommendation that suggests an association of “Planet of the Apes” with Martin Luther King and other African American heroes.

…ONLY ONE PROBLEM… (prying the DVD from my cold, dead hands….)

As any fan of both Planet of the Apes and MLK would know, this association is reasonable and flattering if taken in the intended sense.

Yet another great example of how artificial intelligence (ie the algo choosing the similar selections) is better than human intelligence*, but we humans are just TOO STUPID TO GET IT.

The references ARE intentional, but not suggesting African Americans = Apes.

This clever algo has CORRECTLY determined that Planet of the Apes has a powerful allegorical theme suggesting that racism and discrimination are fundamentally wrong …. and that these are the same notions of … the people on the list!

I can’t wait for the computers to take over, there will be so much less explaining to do!

*Example TWO: Try playing chess against a modern computer.
*Example THREE Try playing ANY game of intellect, even those that have a large component of chance, against a computer.

Today’s profundity is this: We need to create charity giving and poverty reduction mechanisms that are easy to scale. I actually think it’s a profound idea. Companies like Wal-Mart, Google, and Ebay are masterworks of complex, scalable, problem solving architectures. The use interchangeable programs/parts/stores/data centers/etc to make it much cheaper and easier to build up capacity, production, and distribution.

Contrast this with, for example, the massive public works programs of the “War on Poverty” or Agency for International Development. Although it’s now common practice to avoid massive projects that tend to create their own problems and leave many concerns unaddressed, this may be getting replaced too often with thinking small which leads to labor intensive, small solutions that don’t really do much for the big picture.

This began as an exchange with Matt at Google when I suggested taking charity donations in exchange for Dennis Hwang’s signed Google logos, which have quickly become one of earth’s most viewed art forms. Matt correctly noted that this was a nice idea, but hard to scale (ie there are only so many Dennis Hwang original logos).

So, what are these scalable solutions? For the undeveloped world Micro loans appear to be one such success story. These are small loans that enable “small time” capitalists to get a start in areas where cultural and economic barriers are illogical and substantial. I’m not convinced this approach can work in the USA as well as 3rd world because the barriers here tend to be personal rather than institutional.

A good test of the scalability of Micro loans is in progress now that EBAY founders are pouring money into that effort. Good for them!

I just posted the points below note to the excellent Matt Cutts at his blog. Citing the official Google blog, even Matt is characterizing the fact that Google won’t change the algo for AOL as an indication they have not jumped the shark or done anything odd.

1) With all due respect to Marissa and Google officialdom, one of the reasons we read you, Zawodny, and Scoble is to get the “real story” rather than the one the PR mavens and corporate legal department have edited. I think I’m still with Battelle on this which means “concerned”.

2) The problem points were not clarified by Marissa. If AOL content has ranking problems and is reviewed by insiders it confers an incredible advantage to AOL content. Why? Because the algo has imperfections. If the insider review simply determines that “AOL’s dogfood section has 302 redirection problems” Google’s given AOL a LOT more than one gets by simply memorizing the guidelines and your posts. I understand this type of help has been given to large advertisers for some time but that is no consolation to the rest of us.

3) I hope Google takes Danny’s (SES) advice and initiates a paid review system for all sites. Charge the big ones more to help subsidize the mom and pop reviews. At the point where special treatment was given to the big guys Google slipped. Paid review is a way to regain that trust.

Call me old school, but I can’t help but think the current obsession with internet video will prove costly in terms of clogging up networks and will not gain mass popularity for some time.

The information internet is revolutionary while the video internet is simply a change in formats with probable reduction in the quality of signal and content.

I predict that the big deal Video thing Google is announcing tomorrow will result in “no big deal”, but… I’ve been wrong before.