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| Subscription Search Engine Services?
As if we ever needed more proof the Internet is going the way of the big commercial players this could just be it. For almost the longest time the Internet has been the champion of the little guy, I mean where else could a kid who, in his bedroom, sticks the half time football scores onto a website, eventually sell his business for three quarters of a million? |
| It was a heartening thing, so plucking a name out of the air someone like the MacDonald’s corporation can afford to pay sixty guys to ream out pages and pages of spiel about their company (who unless you’ve fallen off of the edge of the earth sell small meaty looking - though not always tasting - products sandwiched in between two spongy slices of something resembling bread) but having said that little Jimmy Smith could make a website with more bells, whistles and other cool things to rival old maccy d’s dot com - it’s possible, people power. |
| Okay, well so far this sort of thing hasn’t been stopped in it’s entirety, but unlike hugely over inflated and often over financed but ultimately failing dot com ventures which are simply giving the web a bad name, search engine subscriptions are killing off the small sites. |
| Do I have proof?
Of course not, I never do! It’s the same thing about the fast food company from before, it’s simply an opinion, so I just get to rant on about it, but to be totally fair I’ve been involved with the internet and it’s development now for a number of years so I’m not entirely unqualified to talk about these things! |
| So, time for a quick example? Fair enough. |
| Elsewhere on this site you can see a table where search engine charges are displayed, now think about that for a second, charges, they charge you! Not like days gone by when a clever (or even ingenious) web designer who was clued up on meta tagging could get a great rank for his site regardless of size and indeed funding. |
| Yet more and more of late I was seeing for example the better known larger uk supermarkets appearing at the top of some of the search engine piles after typing in fairly generic searches (for example “fresh fruit” would bring tesco, asda, sainsburys etc to the top?) which I have to admit make me think. |
| That’s the thing about the web, search engine spiders, etc, it’s not an exact science, so I could have done a page in a site about burgers and burger meat and burger baps (and so on) and tagged the page accordingly and managed to get my page to pop in above our friends from before, can you imagine the possibilities?! |
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| Now the sad thing is this was (and on some services could still be) possible,
but increasingly it’s the other way around. Who knows how much money (if any)
changes hands in order to get the big names above everyone else, but you can guarantee,
and with respect to the guys working in the big companies IT departments, there
are bound to be far more talented web designers out there somewhere, meaning there
must be better set-up pages with better tags and therefore deserving of better
rankings? You’d think so huh? Having had a scan around some of the larger uk supermarkets websites the majority of them do have keywords and in most cases descriptions, but for the most part that’s simply all the meta information they have. How do you find out more about meta tags? Go to www.google.com (I like it cos it’s fast!) and in the search box type the following (without the quotes) “perfect meta tags” Look in the results list and you should see in second place Meta Perfect - Meta Tag Generator at http://www.cyberat.com/metaperfect/ if you don’t then click the link. Go there, read the page then agree it’s sad. Here are some more links about meta tags and I checked them - there are pages there! http://www.searchenginetalk.com/yahoo/387.html http://azurii.freeservers.com/metatags/tutorial.html http://www.htmlprimer.com/metatags.shtml and so on…. |
| So why so bitter? |
| Why? Well didn’t the gurus say the web would never be commercialised? I mean it’s hardly fair for the little guys who don’t have an endless budget to throw the way of pay-for promotion services, as I said, there was a time when you simply made sure of your meta tags and either used some software, topdogg, dynamic submission wizard, etc or used a few online submission services and your site was listed. Of course there are the engines that send their spiders out there to gather information and add it to their ever growing database, google is an example of such a service, go check out their info pages, interesting reading (to say the least!) Anyway, if you find you have to pay a few pounds here and a few pounds there it soon makes a website a far more costly business, as many of you will know you could make a site simply with a domain name and some cheap webspace (it was always less easy to get a site listed with no domain and some freebie webspace) But aside from all that even if you did pay there’s no guarantee your site would be listed for anything up to a couple of months! |
| The Solution Is there one? |
| This site is one of a few that’s not afraid to take the greedy corporate
types to task for reducing the web to nothing more than a ‘whos got the biggest
member’ type contest. Shit, we’d all love to have docklands offices and brand
new state of the art pc’s that we only use for two hours a day since the rest
of the time we’re off out ‘power lunching’ or networking, but the simple fact
of the matter is we don’t all have endless budgets to play with, but that is/was
what made the web special, when a fan site could become bigger and more ‘official’
than an official site, when a joke site could stay up for more than a week without
being ripped down even though the free speech issue still effects or when some
small cafe tucked away in a quiet corner of a sleepy London suburb could put up
a site to rival the major worldwide fast food chains sites…. |
| So would the makers of this site be hypocrites if they still tried to list
it with some of which it stands against? I don’t see how, it’s a trend that’s
not in the best interest of everyone, just those that want to throw it about like
confetti There should be, or soon will be a message board, guestbook and email
addresses on the site, I for one, urge any of you who feel the same to write messages,
this isn’t a cheap pop at getting loads of names in a guestbook, it’s about the
future of the web and who controls it - would you rather it be the many or the
few? |
| Further to that, I’d love to start a revolt be asking anyone who was brave enough to make it this far, If they find a few slack minutes, to visit their favourite search engine and have a check if they charge, or have a ‘keywords’ scheme or any other incentive, then take a couple of minutes and email them, ask them if they really need to make money on ranking sites, as if sponsorship wouldn’t bring in enough. Let us know, any replies might be reproduced somewhere on the site if you do, but then you can take pride in the knowledge that you might be helping the scandal crew in their quest! |
| As for this little rant it’s purely down to me, not the makers of the site, any abuse, death threats, flames, etc, send them to me! C (email) |