SearchEngineZ - News and Ideas

There has been lots of talk lately about Twitter, TinyURL, and other URL shortening services. To me the solution is obvious....

• Twitter develops their own URL shortening service. Shouldn't be hard, such scripts can be purchased for $10...
• Twitter adjusts their software, so that when they check the length of any tweet, the first URL is counted as just 7 characters
• URLs embedded in tweets just appear like this uGT5ER7 - with the u denoting it is a Twitter short URL
• If Twitter also launched a browser toolbar, with a big button for Tweet This Page, which automatically embedded a short URL for the page you are visiting, then the process is complete

By doing so, Twitter could gather data on which pages online were being tweeted the most, and the click through rate.

Labels: twitter

So the article says. Extremely misleading, and the author then extrapolates this to suggest that "Facebook could kill Google".

Here's what is said:

Ross also illustrates how important Facebook has become to Google as a traffic source. Fully 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook, up from 9% a year ago. At the very least, this will likely give Facebook the leverage to negotiate a sweet referral deal at some point.

Here's the reality:

• Facebook does not link to Google (unless some places a link, or a YouTube video on their page)
• The traffic comes from people finishing whatever they were doing at Facebook, and typing google.com directly into the browser
  
• This result is directly related to the amount of time people spend on such a popular site. It would be the same for other popular sites
• Google would not give Facebook anything for these referrals, because they are purely related to the popularity of Google; Facebook isn't doing anything to help
  

Labels: facebook, google

Well, a few people will be saying farewell, but most of us didn't care for or use Wikia Search. With only 10,000 unique visitors per month it just didn't have enough users to work. About the only good it has done is prompting Google to enable users to personalise results.

Wikia Search had the right idea, but the wrong methodology. The search engine that knocks Google off their perch will be mostly automated, but augmented by paid staff - experts that tweak results and remove spam. For example, if an algorithm can show me websites that it thinks are spam, I could probably verify their spammy-ness at a rate of 20 per minute. The algorithm can then use this knowledge to delete in bulkfrom the index similar sites made by the same people... I could go on. Google, hire me! (again).

Labels: wikia search