Search engine optimization as we all should know is only one aspect of Web marketing, which itself is only one aspect of marketing. Marketing can be described as the process of identifying and sati…

The whole article is good, thoughtful.  What caught my eye was the observations about webrings.  This addresses the question of scale of any one given ring and the sweet spot in terms of numbers of members in the webring.  Recommended reading.

Personally I don’t think those sweet spot numbers will change even for modern webring management code because human behavior hasn’t really changed.

I feel a vacuum cleaner post coming on.  No, really, about old school vacuum cleaners.  🤓

What the heck, I’m in. 😀  Kicks, I’m real interested in what you cook up.  Best of luck to you!

In Reply to Kicks Condor: Let Me Link to You

I love Micro.blog and I love the Duckduckgo (DDG) search engine.  If you have a Micro.blog hosted blog, some of the themes (last I looked) had a site search box powered by DDG.  I had one for a few months.

Site search is important on a blog.  What I found was DDG was taking quite a long time to index any pages on my Micro.blog blog.  This kinda made the site search unusable.  So the answer is to get DDG to index more.

Somewhere along the line I ran across this:

How to get indexed on DuckDuckGo if you’re running a smaller website

Even though that article is a few years old, it seems to dovetail with something I saw when testing DDG site search on more established blogs, when I kept noticing some mention about Yandex.com on the Duckduckgo search results pages.

What you are going to do is:

1. Go to Yandex.com and register for Webmaster Tools.  (This is similar to Google or Bing’s Webmaster tools.
2. Submit your site to Yandex using the webmaster tools.

The carpenter finished rescreening the screened porch yesterday, so today I need to paint while the weather holds.  Git er done, so I can cross this project off the list.

Last week was the 8th annual IndieWeb Summit held in Portland, Oregon. It was a roaring success.

Favorite Single Malt Scotch: The MacAllen, 12 year, sherry cask. A near religious experience.  Favorite Blended: Dimple Pinch.  Favorite Budget Scotch: Inverhouse. First sip is a little rough but it smooths out some.

This is an Indieweb conforming site search script.  Very interesting. Very powerful.  Site search is so important.

Source: phinde, my self-hosted search engine

The number of Linux distributions available just keeps getting bigger. In fact, in the time it took me to write this sentence, another one may have appeared on the market. Many Linux flavors have trouble standing out in this crowd, and some are just a different combination of puzzle pieces joined to form something new: An Ubuntu base with a KDE desktop environment.

A comprehensive overview of the history of search engine technology companies. Read about search’s origin in 1945 and innovation through today.

Replying to: Kicks Condor.

Horror directory:  This was really a faux directory.  Every category was really a search with the category name as the search keyword.  Of course you could do multi keyword searches from the search box.  Ranking was mainly done by keyword placement and density: KW in Title carried X weight, KW in description carried Y weight, KW on page carried Z weight, etc.  It worked.

Science fiction/Fantasy directory:  This was a static directory with categories.  Pretty conventional.  At first sites were ranked by user voted 1 - 5 star rank next by alphabetical order for those with no votes.  At one point I tried an experiment:  “SearchHippo” a little search engine had a free API to compute “HipRank” (poking fun at Google’s PageRank).  Google’s directory listed sites by order of PageRank.  So I had my developer incorporate  listing sites in categories by “HipRank”.  :)

Nobody appreciated the joke.  So I reverted back to the old way.

Most of the old directory scripts had a simple meta tag fetcher like you describe.  We really could not launch a new niche directory without any sites listed in it.  Visitors would come to us trying to find sites and they would never come back if you gave them empty categories. So we would seed the directory with sites, a few for each category.  That was a lot of work for one person, but we would use that meta tag fetcher (spider) to help us.  I always tried to launch with at least 700 sites listed.  That kind of seeding went on throughout the life of the directory.  A new TV show would launch and you would add new categories for that show and seed, then add categoires for the actors and seed with fan sites.

Tags: The thing is with a static hierarchical directory you get stuck with the hierachy you built.  Tags, even reddit semi permanent tags, are more dynamic and finer grained.  By letting a site like Reddit create the categories you help stay on top of what topics are new and fresh.  It’s like suggestions coming from the grass roots rather than top-down.

But in a small niche community, with a directory editor who really know their community you could have a hierarchical directory with no problem.  Or you could use a combination of search field and a tag cloud.  On a niche directory that might be more minimalist.

Categories did serve a purpose: as a prompt to explore deeper:

Star Trek below that TOS, TNG, DS9, ENT, VOY

Below TOS: William Shatner,  Nimoy, Fanfic,  etc.

Each is a prompt to explore further, deeper, hear other voices.  We are too used to Google giving us the a page and then we leave as if that is the entire answer.

I’m geeking out!  There really is a webring revival.  Who would have thunk it?  If you are doing Indieweb, you should apply to these rings.  They need members.

I was remiss in my webring launch announcement.  I should have listed the other Indieweb web rings right from the start.  So here goes:

An Indieweb Webring - Official ring, very cool. very Indieweb tech.

WordPress Indieweb Webring - For WordPress users with Indieweb powered sites. I love the fact that you can run a webring with WP!

IndieWeb Writers Ring - Vintage style, organic, free-range.

Sauron need not apply.  🤓

Grand Opening: IndieWeb Writers Ring.  Check out the requirements and feel free to join.

This is an old school (Web 1.0) web ring about the IndieWeb.

This is a continuation of my earlier post on webrings.  Start there for context.

I used the analogy of a webring being a road or highway.  So I just remembered something I did back in the old days.

1. I created three rings on different ring hosts: Webring, Ringsurf, Bomis.  This was to take advantage of traffic coming from the ring host website which were very busy and like a directory of webrings.
2. The rings had different graphics, but all three had identical membership requirements.  (All were science fiction/fantasy rings.) But they had different members with some crossovers.
3. I created a Junction Page and put all three ring codes on it.  I explained to the visitor that this was an opportunity for them to switch to surfing another ring if they wanted or continue on with the ring they came in on. I was the Ringmaster of all three so I could do that.
4. I was running a science fiction/fantasy directory. Webmasters that submitted their sites for directory inclusion got an acceptance email.  At the end of that email was a link to a page about other traffic things we offer webmasters like - those webrings.  All free.  And of course when you joined a ring, that acceptance email mentioned the directory…
5. All three rings grew.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

Replying to Kicks Condor.

Thanks for replying.  If the Web is our social network, then the question of finding stuff on the web looms large.  Which is what led me to post about search engines and directories.

I like your observations about recency vs static in directories.  To me the directory of the future needs to be a hybrid of directory and search engine:  It needs to combine both recency and curated static PLUS a crawler.  Reddit is a good starting point for recency if you have a spider crawling to pick up newly posted URLs plus the archives.  Add in Curlie and Wikipedia to the crawl but use sub Reddits for taxonomy.  That’s for general search engine.

Once upon a time: I used Fluid Dynamics Search Engine to create a  sort of crawling Horror Fiction directory.  It used the Meta tags and or user submitted data, plus it crawled the submitted page so it was indexing both meta data plus real on page text for search database.  It worked quite well. I had always wished I had the resources to crawl deeper.

Anyway, I think you are on to something.

The goal is discovery, I think using many means, large and small is best.

First, let me say, I understand that the IndieWeb movement already has a lot on their plate and that they have already accomplished a lot.

It seems to me, at some point, the problem of commercial silos of web search engines must be addressed since 1. a near monopoly is held by Google, 2. both spidering engines (Google and Bing) are oriented towards brands, data mining user profiles, advertising and the commercial.

How we build websites today, is largely controlled by what Google likes and dislikes.  If you don’t build the site Google’s way, you don’t rank in Google.  If you don’t rank in Google, you might as well be dead.  It has happened slowly over time, but Google has warped the Web into it’s own image. We don’t build websites the same way we did Before Google (BG).

But there are alternative search engines, and I like and use several of them.

Duckduckgo - protects user privacy. Draws search results from many sources. Bing is the backbone of their search results.  They do have their own spider and index but I’m not sure how large that is.  If Bing should cease operating DDG will be in trouble.

StartPage - protects user privacy. Is basically Google feed stripped of geolocation and personal search history data. But if Google ever turns off access to the search feed, StartPage is gone.

Hotbot -  claims to protect privacy.  Appears to be straight up Bing feed, stripped of advertising and tracking customization.  Clean, minimalist results pages. But if Bing should cease operating, HotBot will go down.

As much as I like Duckduckgo and StartPage, both depend on the search indexes of large siloed companies.  With only two major search engines (Google and Bing) that spider the web it seems like an unhealthy state of affairs.

What can the IndieWeb do?

Off the self solutions

Mojeek.com - privacy protecting. UK based. Active spidering as money permits.  Has potential.

Gigablast.com - Open Source code. Active spidering as money permits.  Can index URL’s very quickly. Has potential.

Both need larger databases. Both need funding. Both need some R&D to improve search results and ranking logarithms.

One option might be for the IndieWeb to campaign for private donations for one or both of these independent search engines. Publicity within the movement would help.

Build Our Own IndieWeb Search Engine(s)?

Searx - (running instance). Open Source Meta search script.  At best this would be a stop gap solution.  One major problem is it is scraping results from other engines without permission, sooner or later that will get shut down.

Gigablast - The script is Open Source.  Gigablast, as is, is quite impressively capable if one can afford to keep it indexing and provide the coding to fork it and improve it.

More Open Source and P2P Search Engines.

Curlie - is the revival/continuation of the Open Directory Project.  Large meta directories have had their day but Curlie could provide two things: 1. a big index for a starting crawl for a new search engine, 2. A ranking indicator of quality for web pages. Human reviewed collections like ODP were used by Google in the early days as a quality indicator in ranking and can be used by new engines.

Wikipedia - 1. Using Wikipedia itself to answer queries, 2. Wikipedia contains a lot of outside links, so it would be another place to use as a starting crawl.

Guerrilla Discovery Options

Directories and Filter Blogs -  niche directories can still work when tied to an interest community (just ask almost any local Chamber of Commerce).  Filter blogs might work too. Boingboing is an example of a filter blog that leads you to things posted on the web.  Most bloggers already do some filter blogging.

I’m sure this has already been discussed within the IndieWeb community.  Coming up with a full fledged search engine would be a monumental task and expensive.  But I’ve also tried to lay out smaller interim steps that will gain experience or help break the corporate silos.

Agree? Disagree? What am I missing? Feel free to comment.

I am looking at Curlie.org, which is the continuation of the human edited Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), and my conclusion remains the same: unfortunately, big static meta directories are obsolete for daily web search.  It pains me to say that because I was a directory owner for many years.

Google has the Curlie’s of the web beat on every point save one big issue: Quality.  A good human editor can say, “this site is quality on the subject, and it deserves to be listed and it deserves to be found.” It’s a bit like a librarian recommending a book: you know it’s going to be on topic and probably pretty good.

The Limits of Google

Theoretically, the brilliantly written page will eventually gain more links back, more notice, but how long do you have to wait: months, years?

We first discussed this back in 2000 on the old Searchking.com forums, and even though Google has improved in so many ways, that central fact remains true.

Does it Matter?

Old School

Anyway, the answer is yes, human edited directories can still have value if they are used right. A fountain pen is a perfectly good writing instrument, we just don’t use them much everyday for writing.

Feel free to tell me what uses am I not seeing.

Ice cream!  😜

What the IndieWeb on Wordpress needs is to be much more robust.  Or it just needs to be more robust in general even without Wordpress.  When it works its glorious. When it doesn’t then you get that free falling and forgot your parachute feeling. Just before you slam into the ground.

It also needs to be simplified. You have rel=me and h-cards, subblubblubs, dowatchies and do-hickeys and you know the damn page links back but it don’t validate as linking back so you have to line up all the offending Indie-dinkybits and say, “Oy, which one of you lot isn’t playing nice?“  Which leads to another diagnostic scud-hunt because all them plugins are denying it, swearing up and down they have an alibi.

And all this sh-t is getting in the way of blogging.  Gah! Zounds! Fie!

Bookmarked: Why ActivityPub is the future.

This reminds me that - many roads lead to Rome.  “Different drummers.” There is more than one way to take down the corporate silos.

After posting my previous post, I dug a little deeper and found a webring host still functioning Webringo.com.  So if you have an idea for a ring you want to start you might give them a try.

I doubt they know about the Indieweb movements efforts to revive webrings.  Maybe somebody from Indieweb should reach out to them and encourage participation. It looks like they are holding on as a hobby, but barely.  A little encouragement might help.

There may be a webring revival afoot.  Webrings had their heyday back in the 1990’s.  Good search engines, like Google helped make them redundant.  Fear of Google, the decline and fall of free hosted websites like Geocities helped kill them off. Yahoo ruining Webring.org didn’t help either.

I was a Ringmaster of several webrings on the old HTML code Webring.org.  I also had several rings on Ringsurf.com.  Eventually, whilst turning my Scifimatter directory into a portal, I added webring hosting which made me a mini-webring host for a few years. Keep in mind this was a time when it was more common to surf the web than use a primitive search engine. (BTW, Ringsurf.com is still around, but I have no idea how they operate today.)

The neat thing about webrings was they were like micro web directories.  They were like taking a subject subcategory of a web directory and linking the sites all together.  The topic possibilities were endless: Dwarves in Tolkien, Vulcans in Star Trek, One Handed Knitters that only use Alpaca Yarn.  You could slice those topics very thinly and create a webring.

Surfing a webring was a bit like getting on a two lane highway, you didn’t know what kind of site or page you would encounter next, all you knew is each site had something to do with the same topic and it was up to the Ringmaster to act as editor and keep crummy sites out and insure the ring codes were in place and working to insure the navigational integrity of the Ring.

I can tell you one thing: being a Ringmaster, in the old days, was a lot of work.  Just try explaining, by email, how to edit HTML to a brand new webmaster that knows nothing about HTML.  Maintaining the navigational integrity of the ring often meant surfing the ring yourself, regularly which burns up time.   Things should be more automated today.

Web Promotion

Webrings brought instant traffic.  Don’t underestimate the value of this.  With modern search engines, you have to somehow gain links back to your site from other websites before you start ranking high in searches.  In the early days of Google it took at least a month to get listed let alone rank.  Even today that can take some time.  In the meantime discovery is difficult.

Webrings brought quality traffic; people surfing a webring of sites about Mr. Spock of Star Trek are sort of pre-qualified to want to stay and read your Spock page(s).  If you had good content the audience was appreciative.

The Odds are with the House

SEO and Webrings

However, at some point many search engines started using link popularity in their algorithms. Simple link popularity was: the more outside pages that link to your page the more important your page was with that search engine.  So the webring HTML codes often provided a lot of links back to sites.  Particularly, the link to that webring homepage described above.  It shows the unintended consequences of using simple link popularity in your algorithms.

Google’s PageRank was a much more sophisticated form of link popularity and not as easy to manipulate.  But those webring HTML codes must have had some effect on PageRank, and Google is hostile to any unnatural linking.  I don’t think Google ever did anything about ring codes, but fanciful theories and rumors got passed around by the SEO community worried that ring codes might effect their Google ranking in a negative way.  This helped reduce the popularity of webrings.

Decline

Future

I applaud the Indiaweb’s willingness to try new old ways to navigate the Web.  But I have to say, nothing in my wildest imaginings, would have led me to think of bringing back webrings.  This ought to be interesting.

In Reply to: Chris Aldrich - Webrings have come back to the web.  Gah!  This brings back half forgotten memories.  I was a RingMaster on both Webring.org and Ringsurf.  Plus I actually ran a Science Fiction/Fantasy webring hosting site via a nice free Perl script for a few years.  I never thought in my wildest imaginings that somebody would revive the webring concept, but it fits with the theme of the Indieweb movement.  (BTW: Ringsurf appears to be still around but I have no idea how it works today.)

What is the purpose of a “tall kitchen garbage/waste bag?“  In my household, it is to keep all the non-recyclable trash together until it reaches the landfill.  An amazing amount of that waste is plastic packaging used on food.  So the plastic garbage bag keeps all this plastic and some paper together both in the home and on the truck.  When driving behind a garbage truck, I see a lot of those plastic “grocery bags” flying out the top or back of the truck to litter the environment or work it’s way into a waterway.  A garbage bag minimizes that.

To me, it does not matter if the garbage bag itself will break down because it is going to be sealed in an air tight landfill and will probably still be there for centuries.

Compostable Plastic Trash Bags

I do see some uses for this technology from BioBag.  They might work as lawn and leaf bags, grocery store produce bags (if strong enough) and dog waste pickup bags, but not for general kitchen trash that is going to end up in a landfill anyway.

Responsibly Sourced Trash Bags

Seventh Generation Drawstring Kitchen Trash Bags:  I bought these in 2017.  They are 65% recycled plastic (somebody has to use up the plastic sent to recycling).  To my surprise, these are pretty darn good.  Strong, reasonably priced and I like the drawstring.  They are also sized right.  They help the environment by creating a use for some of that plastic we recycle and they take less energy to produce.  I would buy these again.

Hippo Sak Tall Kitchen Bags:  So far I like these the best.  The material is 85% plant based from sugar cane.  They are not any more environmentally friendly after you use them than any other plastic bag, but they use less petroleum products so that’s a win.  They are very strong and resist leaking.  I didn’t think I would like the handles but I found it just as easy to tie then off to secure the top as any draw string bag. I will buy these again.

Your routine and circumstances may vary from mine.

Shadows Over Baker Street, is a crossover of Sherlock Holmes and the Lovecraft Mythos.  The collected short stories are by well known Scince fiction and fantasy authors.  So far I’m finding it good and enjoyable but I’m not calling it great. 📚