Posts Tagged ‘search engine’
Ask – Stealing Traffic or Something
A few weeks ago, I went into Ask.com to look for some alternate results. Sometimes, when I am not happy with Google, I will throw a few searches to their way.
I noticed something odd at the time, but was too busy to look any further. Today, when I did another search on Ask.com, I noticed the same thing. It seems like Ask.com is appending URLs and keeping traffic on Ask.com.
Not sure what I am talking about, I created a Jing capture to demonstrate the Ask.com issue.
I did some searches on Google for any information about it. I also did a query on SearchEngineLand.com because they seem to talk about every detail of the search world.
Nothing. Maybe this tactic is such old news, but I dip into Ask with enough frequency that I think I would have caught it before.
If this strategy is really going on, it leaves me with two major questions: 1- this tactic is something that about.com had used but was transparent about and 2 – is Ask.com so desperate they they have to resort to amping up traffic to stay afloat?
Does anyone have any info or thoughts on this?
People searching people…
Your online reputation is rapidly becoming one the big things to track at the moment. There are a few sites out there, I use ClaimID, that you can gather together comments, feeds or sites that you own or that are about you.
I can tag this information, add notes and use XFN to highlight the relevancy of these links to “me”. But what if I want to search for a person using this type of information? Well that’s where Spock comes in.
Spock is, in their words, a search application for people
. This means that you can search, as would in Google or Yahoo, for a person but the information that you get is a mixture of community & self tagging as well as spider crawls of popular sites.
This then returns you a list of search results more like condensed bios. Once you find the person that you are looking for you can then click through into their profile. You can also search for terms such as “drunk driving” and see which “celebrity” pops up.
From here, if you are signed in, you can claim the entry (if it’s about you) add tags, vote for a tags relevancy, plus a host of other options. Also on your own profile you can add websites that are to do with you, claim email address and import your contact lists from a wide array of clients and sites (I assume this is to grow the amount of people in it’s servers).
I found it very easy to use and navigate around. I found myself, filled in some of my profile and started digging around. Though still in beta (I did stumble across a problem & they were very prompt in replying) it’s very solid. The index updates every couple of hours which, I’ve been told, is faster than Google.
You can also:
- decided if users can tag you with adult terms or not
- create a widget to put on your blog/website pointing back to your spock profile
- add photos of yourself or others
- define relationships between you and other people
- add a descriptive blurb about yourself.
- add favorites and search amongst those
It would be good if they started using microformats to mark the relationships between you and others as well as the tags, but I’m sure that’s on the radar.
It has the potential to be a great tool for companies and individuals alike as we create and join more and more social networks.
With that spock has been kind enough to let me have some extra invitations to pass out so if anyone wants to try spock out either leave a comment/IM/email your email address.
Blogged with Flock