Phil Bradley's weblog

Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag

Here's one for the people interested in SEO. Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag. I thought this was pretty obvious, and it's certainly been the advice that I've been handing out over the last year or so. Basically, put a meta tag descriptor onto every page to define exactly what that page is about, otherwise Google will do it for you by taking the first few words it finds either at the start of the page, or keyword in context, which may well be not what you want to happen. Besides, it's a good academic practice anyway - if you can't sum up your webpage in a short pithy description then you've got too much diverse content on it so you need to think again.

(If none of that made any sense to you, don't worry about it - you probably didn't need to know in the first place!)

Splashr

  Splashr 
This is a very nice little tool. Splashr lets you take some tagged Flickr pics and make them into various types of slide show. You can see the one that I made of a visit to Groombridge Place in Kent to give you an idea of just one of the 25+ ways that you can create slideshows. This is a great way of putting together a presentation if you're doing training for example. It also provides you with the code to put the presentation directly onto your own site or into a weblog.
 

LibWorm

Link: LibWorm: Librarianship RSS Search and Current Awareness.Very nice utility this one - gives you access to over 1,000 RSS feeds from a wide variety of librarians, types of library, and also has a category approach as well. I've added it to my public PageFlakes librarian template  so you now have a choice of 3 different search engines for librarian weblogs.

Google serps

Google serps
Originally uploaded by Philipbradley.

Google like playing around with the way that their results are displayed, and although this one isn't new, I'd not seen it myself. A search for Medio gives me 3 results, then 'See results for meedio' with 3 more and then back to Medio again.

This is *not* helpful. I know what I want, and it's to see results for Medio. Thanks for offering me stuff that I'm not interested in Google, and messing up the page and just being generally irritating. If you really want to help, why not have a little line at the top saying 'Do you mean Meedio?' or 'See the results for Meedio?'. Oh yeah, I was forgetting - you kind of do that already.

Y'know, Google reminds me of a supermarket - they're always fiddling around with the position of products - one week you go down the aisle for fruit, and you turf up the next week, and it's the frozen meat section. Just stop fiddling around!

Search Engine Land Correspondents Named

As I mentioned some time ago Danny Sullivan is leaving SearchEngineWatch very shortly. He's starting a new resource called Search Engine Land, subtitled 'All the search that's fit to print' and he'll be writing it together with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz. Danny has now finished getting a group of correspondents together and has listed them here. To save you the trouble of looking they are me, Bill Slawski, Jennifer Slegg, Brian Smith and Greg Sterling.

Just to sort out the concerns expressed by Gray Hat Search Engine News, Danny has agreed that it won't be necessary for me to change my name to fit into the 'S' surname policy. :)

Threatening librarians

I mentioned in my weblog the other day that there is an attempt to get the racist Luther King website knocked down the rankings at Google, and the campaign is being run by Tom Hoffman with that link going directly to his weblog. His original idea of linking to various other MLK sites by providing a template and essentially Googlebombing the search engine has been superceded by his creation of notmartinlutherking.org (I've deliberatly not linked to it for reasons that will become obvious) which he's calling 'a technically simple way to link to martinlutherking dot org without adding to its page rank'. He's 'protected' it from search bots by it' robots.txt file and using rel="nofollow", so the links that go through his site won't increase the page rank.

All fine and dandy except that not all bots honor the robots.txt file. To block all bots it's necessary to start playing around with a file called .htaccess in order to specifically block them. So, while this is going to work with Google (he doesn't seem to be aware that there are other search engines out there), it's not necessarily going to work with all of them. In fact, if there are search engines out there that use the concept of page rank in a similar way to that used by Google (pages are considered important if lots of pages link to them, and if they then link to other pages that link is regarded as being particularly important) AND that don't honor the robots.txt file he's actually going to be doing the exact opposite of what he's trying to do!

At this point I should also say I don't know if this is the case in fact, just in theory, but if someone who is more familiar with specific search engines in this much detail could confirm or deny in that would be most helpful. More to the point however, I doubt that Hoffman knows either.

That's not actually the point of this post however. He did a trawl of the links that point to the site - because he could. He estimates that there are 180 of them. I did a simple search and Google returned almost 400. I then ran the same search on Yahoo, which reported over 3,400, and Live.com gave me over 2,000. Clearly his premise doesn't actually work that well, and he's entirely misunderstanding the concept of ranking, and even if it wasn't, it's going to relate to Google, and there are a lot of other search engines out there besides Big G. Anyway, having found these 180 websites he's written to them, asking them to change the link, and I don't actually have a problem with him doing that in the slightest; I got such an email - I thought I'd removed all my direct links to the site ages ago, but he found one. However, I turned it into a TinyURL to redirect, which I think is more elegant and gets around the problem of spiders and robots mentioned above.

Now - is he also going to email the other 2,000 or more websites as well? If not, why not? If the job is worth doing, it's worth doing well. Or, if he's just targetting that 180, how does he justify that? It's a bit like saying that he wants to change an article in one reference book but he doesn't care about the rest of them.

If he stopped at that point - well, fair enough I suppose. However, that's not where he's stopped, he's gone a stage further, and I quote: "Now that everyone has gotten fair warning, the next step may be nomination to The Skinhead Enablers Hall of Shame, coming to a weblog near you, unless or until I get tired of this."

My italics, his emboldening. So here we really to the nub of the thing - he is not content with expressing his own opinion, he wants other people to agree with him, and do what he wants - even when he doesn't actually know exactly what he IS doing - and anyone who disagrees with him is being threatened and bullied. Clearly he's not in favour of free speech, and rather keener on threats against people who hold views different to his own. Astonishingly, he doesn't appear able to see it.

Moreover, he is criticising a group of people (librarians and educators) who do point out the need to evaluate, to think critically, and not to accept everything they read. I've known about the MLK site for years, and I've used it in classes that I've run and spoken about it at conferences - as have other librarians as well. Yet, because we don't do things in the manner that he seems to think we should, he has decided to resort to threats. If people gave Hoffman any credence or respect for his initial opinion or campaign I suspect that he may well start watching it dribble away, since he's now moved the discussion entirely away from MLK into the arena of 'do as I say or suffer the consequences'. In my opinion, (and it's just that - you're more than welcome to hold an entirely different one), anyone who now supports him is condoning his threats and bullying tactics. How the racists must be laughing.

ResearchBuzz :: New Kid-Friendly Search Engine to Avoid: Zoo

Tara Calishain over at  ResearchBuzz has also had a go at Zoo.com the ah.. 'kid friendly' search engine, and has come to pretty much the same conclusion that I did in my post
a while back. I think she's even more annoyed about the sponsored results element than I was!

Search Engine Decoder | Relationship Chart

Link: Search Engine Decoder | Relationship Chart. I've seen this and used it a few times in the past, so I thought I'd mention it properly - it's a great little resource that shows links between search engines and which engines supply others with results. Worth a quick peek, and great if you're a trainer.

Online Information 2006

As the year draws to a close one event stands out, and it's not Christmas, it's Online Information which is taking place between November 28th and 30th - it seems to be getting earlier every year! It's a show that I really quite enjoy, and I'll be there for a fair amount of it. Specifically:

Day One Track One
14.00-15.30 'What's new in Search?' Moderator, with Stephen Arnold, Amelia Kassel and Chris Sherman.

Day One Track One
16.00-17.30 'Search V Discovery' Karen B Moderating, me speaking on 'The Death of Search' Tor Crockett, Amelia Kassel.

Day Two Exhibition Floor
11.00-11.30 Information Masterclass 'Designing effective webpages' (Open to the public)

Day Two Track One
16.30-17.30 'Future of Social Software and Web 2' Panel discussion. Me moderating with Adriana Cronin-Lukas, Ben Edwards, Matt Locke, Ewan McIntosh, Robert Scoble.

If you're attending either the conference or the exhibition or both do look out for me and come up and say 'hi!'.

Doing down Martin Luther King

There's an interesting article over at the weblog of Tom Hoffman, an educator, (from my brief look at his site) entitled OK, Let’s Knock martinlutherkingdotorg Down a Few Pegs, Shall We?. For those unaware of this site, the Martin Luther King .org site currently comes up second in the Google search for his name (both with and without quotes). The summary is 'The truth about Martin Luther King: Includes historical trivia, articles ... valuable resource for teachers and students alike'. It turns out that when you spend any time looking at the site you realise that it's been put together by a white power/rascist/nasty organisation.

The problem is that because lots of people link to it, with a fair number doing so directly because they want to make the point that it's either a) a rascist site or b) to demonstrate that you can't trust the internet or b) to evaluate resources these links are actually pushing it up much further in the rankings. Certainly since I've been watching the site, which is now over a couple of years it's gone from #6 in Google to #2 on average. In Yahoo the first reference I found  to it as at #36. Over at Live.com it's #1. Over at Ask I didn't see it in the top 60 results. Exalead has it at #1  and Accoona has it at #3.

Clearly this is not good, for a whole host of obvious reasons. The question becomes 'what, if anything, should be done about it?' I don't think it's something the search engines should get involved with themselves, because that's a slippery slope they're already peering down. The suggestion from Hoffman is two fold - not to link to the site itself and secondly, to link to a whole bunch of other sites that treat the subject rather more objectively, or at least, without a rascist bias.

I'm in two minds on this. Obviously it's a nasty little site, and I don't like it, but it is unfortunately a very good example of why you can't trust search engine results, and how it's necessary to evaluate material. However, this can be done by not linking directly to it, but making a simple text link that can be cut, pasted and edited, such as www.martinlutherking_dot_org or by creating a TinyURL link to the site. Linking to other, better MLK sites is a good idea, and I approve of that - as long as - and this is my caveat - they are good and informative sites without an inherent bias in them. Hoffman lists a number of sites which I presume are good quality, but since my knowledge of MLK is limited I'm going to have to take his word for it. Improving the general quality of search engine results is obviously a good idea, and that's one way that will work across engines. I'd also suggest that it's worth visiting search engines that allow you to rank/rate results and boosting some sites at the expense of others.

On the other hand, to what extent should we be doing this anyway? I make the point that Google bombing isn't really a good idea, using the obvious 'Liar' and 'Miserable Failure' examples, which at least have the advantage of being humourous and clearly obvious manipulation of the rankings. However, if we then decide to say 'This is a bad site (because I/we think so) and I'm going to do something about it by articifically attempting to adjust the rankings in Google et al is that actually a good thing? After all, at what point would we want to stop? Get that site (or any other) off the #2 spot? Off the #10? How about down to #100. How about out of the Google database? How about closing the site down entirely? Of course, then you can go to the second step which is 'why stop at that site?' Do we then end up with groups of people artificially attempting to move pages up and down the rankings? Yes of course we already have that, with Search Engine Optimisers and indeed individual web authors, but I hope that the point I'm making is clear.

I don't have answers I'm afraid, but I'd be interested in opinions and comments, since this is an important issue, particularly from the viewpoint of educators and librarians.