Now Google is supposed to help us all find things we are looking for right?  So why can’t they figure out a simple thing like when I mistype the url?  It seems like they could at least do something like take the url and cycle it through their own search to see if something comes up.  Interestingly if you pass in “/analtyics google” to google you do at least get what you are looking for the in the adwords results.  (Maybe they could use this to generate some adwords revenue from themselves). 

In any case, a company with so much money and the market leadership in searching the internet should figure out some way to better facilitate user navigation of this type.  Google it seems needs to take some time to better find itself.

 

In a similar vein, it seems like one could track the time between when one clicks a SERP result, and when a corresponding ad is clicked on the destination page as a possible indicator of spam activity.  There are so many pages now that are nothing but lifted content designed to get in the SERPs to earn revenue through adwords or similar ad networks.  If very quickly after the average visitor is sent to page, another ad is clicked, this might identify these ad-centric pages and allow for them to be moderated down or out of the results as appropriate. 

This of course is somewhat limited as the engine must match the ads being served to track the time difference.  Also, there is a conflict of interest in these situations, as the engines may themselves be benefiting from the revenue these sites produce.  In the long run though, getting rid of these sites will improve the user experience, and thus improve the value of the ad channel to potential advertisers.   So even if it’s value is somewhat limited, it might be worth trying to put something like this in place to at least guarantee the integrity of the ad network within the serving engine itself.

Here is one idea for how this problem might be solved. 

1. A site owner creates an account at a search engine where they establish their identity and receive a unique site id.
2. The site owner then logs in and provides an article, which the search engine in turn gives an article id.  The author embeds this id in the cotent via some kind of meta tag when the article is published to the web.
3. When content is analyzed by the engine during its normal indexing process, if it sees an article id, the search engine cross-references the id with the site owner id and profile to see if it is registered to that site owner. If the article is registered, the site owner is considered the source whenever there is a question of duplicate content where some site must be hidden.
4. To deal with instances where content is fraudulently registered, you would need some kind of challenge process where someone could submit evidence that they were the rightful author. In turn, site owners found to be repeat offenders in terms of false content registrations could have their accounts revoked and could be removed from the SERPs entirely in extreme cases.

There would seem to be benefits all around from this kind of system.  First of all, site owners who work hard to create original content would have more time to spend being creative and could spend less time on copyscape and similar services hunting down the people stealing their articles.  It might promote greater use of RSS, as you could build into feed systems something where it is not syndicated until each entry is tagged with a valid article id, giving possible syndicators less to worry about in terms of duplicate content penalties.  The engines themselves would benefit as well as they would have a good way to have content pumped into them directly without having to be as dependant on going out to find content.  Also, the engines would have yet another possible tool to use to round up and discipline spammers.

There are of course a ton of logistical issues to overcome, and figuring out what to do with all the existing content out there would be an enormous hassle, with huge potential for fraudulent claims.  However, ultimately we need something better than the copyright system to identify the source of content.   

By the way, if someone does create such a system, I claim my right to article ID #1.  First registered post!

A quick illustration of why this matters.  Over the last few days I have been working on installing wordpress 2.0 and drupal on my home machine.  I want to do some theme and plugin development locally, and wanted to develop a deeper understanding of all the pieces involved in these open source content management systems. At home I have a mac laptop running os X 10.4, and a windows desktop windows xp pro.  To get these CMS systems working you basically need Apache, PHP, Mysql, and Mod_Rewrite. 

Installing each of these in a windows environment is fairly straightforward once you cobble together all the appropriate installers and instruction sets.  However, getting to the point whether you have all that is not so simple.  There are lots of great articles out there explaining how to set everything up, however every one I looked at had some significant bug in the article that made the installation process much longer than it needed to be.  In short, make sure IIS is not running when you run the apache installer, make sure you edit the right section of httpd.conf when trying to enable mod_rewrite, and understand that some drupal themes just don’t work with php 5 right now.  I could now install these systems in 10 minutes on any xp machine, but due to all the buggy info I ran accross, I spent 6 hours in total getting everything working (and mod_rewrite still isn’t working on my mac yet). 

The context of development information is somewhat specialized, however, any info can be buggy.  I’ve seen product recommendation sites incorrectly list features of products.  I’ve seen news articles that wrongly describe someone’s educational background.  Bad information is out there everywhere.  Even when the basic information available is worthwhile, it can also be rendered less valuable by poor information design (check out Edward Tufte’s analysis of the space shuttle disaster in Visual Explanations for an example of how serious the problems this kind of ‘formatting’ problem can cause). 

So here are my concrete suggestions.  There should be a common syntax for article authors to post corrections to their pages.  From a browser point of view, when correction metadata is found, this can be highlighted in some way,  especially for users that visited the article before the corrections were posted.  Article owners should also be able to post limitations that govern the utility of their articles.  For example, for a technical article you should indicate what kind of technical setup an article applies to.  For a product review situation, you might indicate whether or not you tested the product yourself, and if so whether it was in a pre-release version or the final consumer version.  This data could also be specially highlighted to help users understand whether you article will actually help them with their questions.

There should also be a common syntax for article users to point out errors and problems they encountered using the article.  This metadata would have to be somehow accessible to other users, so some kind of toolbar entry / community search result situation would be best (like my yahoo coupled with the yahoo toolbar with new features).  The feedback should be able to cover everything from the accuracy of the basic data being reported to problems with how the information is being displayed (Tufte style analysis).

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be suggesting a particular xml document structure representing the kind of feedback and meta information I am interested in readers and authors sharing.