Bob Weigel of Sound Doctorin' launches a concept which would revolutionize the way search engines evaluate many web pages. If you've ever done a search for something and you have to thrash through 10 pages of irrelevant links before finally throwing your hands up in anger, you know that MANY of the worthless 'hits' you see could be eliminated if were were to simply implement a context tag which allows us to set the beginning and end of a block of information that relates within a page. In the video I suggest that the same thing could sort of be accomplished by making a separate web page for each item, but this isn't totally true. Because some people just want all the information to be seen on the same page. For example in a page advertising a lot of different things for sale. They don't want separate pages because they want a person's eye to be able to scan across the page and see all the items at once just as if they were coming into their store.
THe problem happens when a person is looking for something specific which happens to have words that are shared by two totally DIFFERENT items on a web page! Now a person goes to this link that has 400 items they have to browse through to figure out WHY they got sent there in the first place!!
The context tag would allow a courteous web designer to prevent this from happening. It would allow 100% of the people looking for the actual items on the page to find the page. But way fewer would come to the page because they were looking for a Korg M1 replacement key, while the only things for sale there were a replacement Car key and a Korg M1 functional unit.
Now if this were implemented, of course there would be no abuse at first because only people who wanted to REDUCE hits would implement it. It's my suggestion that as search engine companies pick this up, that they would wait a bit until a significant number of people are using it. Here is a rigorous procedure that would absolutely eliminate abuse if this were used for POSITIVE ranking points though.
1) The Search Engine companies would take not of people using the tags.
2) They would evalute those who are properly using the tags.
3) They would INVITE these people to have an account on their FEEDBACK SYSTEM
4) They would THEN begin giving ranking benefits to those using the tags.
5) As people who are properly using the tags begin to notice those who aren't, they can leave feedback about the abuses. And demerits from this would result in the engine dropping the site from their results! If the people who own the site didn't like that fact that they are getting no hits, then they have two options
* fix the problem and click a link to be re-evaluated
or
* file a comlaint for review.
If the reviewers at the search engine find that the abuse complaint is legit then they perma-ban the morons. If they find that it's NOT legit then they call the person who filed the complaint into question. Three strike rule possibly.
Anyway I believe this system would be absolutely fool-proof and it would radically alter the internet into a much more useful tool; eliminating one major abuse aspect almost entirely. -Bob Weigel
<< Back to article
