Dear Blogger.com,
We liked you for a bit, but after a while you started to let us down. Come on, that’s not how a friend is supposed to be. Lately you were never there when we needed you. Late at night when we needed to post a blog entry, you were gone.

After you started to hang out with Google you changed. It feels like we don’t know you anymore.

Now we’ve found a new friend. His name is WordPress. We haven’t known him for that long yet, but so far he seems like a much more reliable friend than you ever were.

We’ve had it with you Blogger. WordPress is our new best friend.

Sincerely,
PlayingWithWire.com

A couple of months ago we wrote that Google’s Searchmash was secretly experimenting with the real next thing in search. Today I noticed that a service similar to what I described in that article has already popped up: Yoople. Here’s what they write:

At Yoople! Project we believe that Web Searches are quite good, but not as smart as a human brain could do. As today we are forced to accept the order given by search engines and click the results as they are, unfortunately this does not mean the human searcher agrees with the returned results index. Moreover clicking a result does not mean the website contains the contents we were looking for.

This is essentially true. No matter how good a machine is at sorting search results and removing spam, it will always be just a machine. It cannot possibly know what people wish should be their top result without in some way actually asking the user. Google tries to work around this limitation by assuming that web pages linking to other web pages constitute ‘the people’s voice’ so to speak and that a link to a web page within a certain category is a vote for bringing that page up to the top of search results for that particular category. This is a sensible approach but it is not perfect. A limited amount of links is one problem. It is also not necessarily the case that the most relevant page has the most links to it: consider spam sites or sites that just get a lot of links in general and therefore rank better even for irrelevant searches.

The people voting ranking algorithm does have a couple of flaws though. Once again the most important one is spam. First of all it’s hard to verify that users are humans. If a user had to fill out a captcha thing every single time they want to rearrange some search results it would get old really quickly. And what’s worse: even if there was a good way to verify that the voter really was a human, how would you be able to verify his intentions? Maybe he’s just a guy paid to vote up search results by some company. Imagine Paypal asking their telemarketing section to take a day off their schedule just to go and vote away Paypal Sucks from the major search engines. It wouldn’t cost them much and it’d almost certainly succeed. A great investment of their money and time.

It is not unlikely that this is something we will see more and more off. Realizing the immense power of sites like Digg, marketing companies will start paying little groups of people to get articles on the front page. Imagine if you’re a technology company and you’d normally pay 15 cents per visitor through normal banner advertising or what have you. You could instead give 50 people $10 each and get 15,000 visitors from Digg. It’s cheaper and comes with all the attached buzz. As we move towards people controlled search engines this will definitely become a problem there too: 50 people voting a website up to the top will have a huge impact for most search terms since it is unlikely that most legitimate users will vote at all.

None the less, the way forward is to allow people to reorder their results and to delete spam results. It’s the only way to really teach search engines what us humans actually want. There are problems along the way but there will be solutions.

           

I know I know. By now you are like, ‘what, another new Cuzimatter feature? Oh my God I don’t know how much more fantastic web 2.0 utility goodness I can take!’

But we had to do it for ourselves. Cuzimatter has been fixed up to generate W3C compatible links. As a bonus we added an ‘icon only’ mode in the advanced settings which we’re going to start using ourselves since our blog writing space is so narrow. Enjoy!

Showing some true Christmas spirit, we’ve gone ahead and added Furl support in Cuzimatter. We’re just too nice. Now your honored blog readers will be able to Furl your blog entries like crazy and you’ll be insanely famous and popular at parties. Just remember to invite your friends at Playing With Wire when you go.

A while back Viktor had to make a server redirect from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com. He experienced some issues because of his lack of control over the server which he wrote about here.

Also the other day we featured an article about the importance of having a unified URL. Since

http://www.domain.com/article.html

looks different than

http://domain.com/article.html

to del.icio.us and similar services, you might not get all that nice attention you deserve. In our article we suggested using Cuzimatter to alleviate the problem. We also linked to a suggestion by Pronet Advertising’s URL’s matter. This article mentions that redirecting everyone to the same URL, if possible, is useful too.

We already use our own solution, Cuzimatter to promote unified links to our articles. But today as you might have noticed, we have also added the other solution: any address on http://playingwithwire.com now redirects to http://www.playingwithwire.com.

Luckily, we have a little bit more control over our own server than Viktor did when he was working with this earlier. So on Playing With Wire, the redirect is as simple as it gets. We use Apache 2 as our web server. Our httpd.conf used to look something like this:

<virtualhost>
  ServerName playingwithwire.com
  ServerAlias www.playingwithwire.com

All we had to do was to change this a little bit. (Note that the Redirect pemanent thing should be just one line including the http://… part.) Here’s the modified configuration:

<virtualhost>       
  Servername playingwithwire.com
  Redirect permanent / http://www.playingwithwire.com/
</virtualhost>

<virtualhost>
  ServerName www.playingwithwire.com
  ...

All done! Works for every page on the site and does not require slow .htaccess files or complicated mod rewrite rules.

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