The main question is the amount of work it would take to build your own search engine. I don't think you should worry too much about the need for alternative search engines. With the same argument, you could say there is no need for any other store because there is Walmart, but that's not the way it works, people like diversity. On the other hand, there must be an argument to attract a cross-section of web users. Privacy could be such an argument, but from what I read here and there, it may be difficult to implement in the US because of something called the patriot act. You probably know much more about this than I do. Even without this, people may be attracted by the idea of not being tracked by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other giants who'd like to know everything we do online. There could be other attractive arguments that you need to discover. Then you could inject a percentage of links to your product.
DaniMeals tell their customers to start following more rules, such as wearing specific badges, comply with ordering in specific ways... etc, etc...
I would imagine that if you started violating some of the more obvious daniweb rules (like "keep it pleasant") on SO you would be infracted/booted very quickly.
As for the food analogy, imagine someone is in line at McD's. The attendant says to that person "what would you like?" and the person says "I want food". How likely is it that a satisfactory exchange will happen quickly?
Now compare that to the person who comes to Daniweb and not only posts a programming question in the Community Forum, but only bothers to enter "My program won't work. What's wrong with it" without providing any context or code?
If the idea is to be more attractive to google by providing a quick answer then it becomes necessary to ask a coherent question that does not require several back-and-forth exchanges before the actual question is stated.
So I think you might agree that some rules/guidelines are necessary.
The main question is the amount of work it would take to build your own search engine
Building a search engine that works well would be incredibly complicated. Having it index a decent enough chunk of the web to be useful would be incredibly expensive. Getting people to actually favour your search engine over what's already out there would be almost impossible.
Keep in mind, when Microsoft needed a search engine they didn't build one from scratch. They already had the dated and not-very-successful MSN search, plus they went out and bought Powerset, Farecast and VideoSurf (probably others, too).
Well, engines such as Qwant seem to be on their way to partially achieve these incredibly complicated and expensive tasks. I don't think their financial wealth and their software production capabilities are anywhere near Microsoft's. Of course, only a small number of people will favour their search engine in the beginning, but it's growing: I discovered them less than one month ago!
Qwant appear to have avoided some of the problems of building their own index and spider by using Bing. Still, it looks like a decent attempt at starting a search business and I wish them luck.
So how come the link is marked as broken in my post? It works just fine.
https://help.qwant.com/help/overview/how-does-qwant-index-the-web/
The button to continue to the page should be more strongly coloured than the 'go back' button, too. Without having full trust in the 'is the link dead' checker, it's probably what most people want to do. If it is dead, they can just click back.
This thread quickly morphed into building your own search engine! Serving whatever you want has not gone down well in some quarters: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-braces-for-record-breaking-1bn-fine-from-eu
If Dani can get people to buy into DZ great. It's been up and running for a while now. Any news on it being used for stuff other than DW?
So how come the link is marked as broken in my post?
I thought that bug had been fixed, but apparently not.
There will probably be some time before Dani is given a fine for abusing market dominance ;)
If Dani can get people to buy into DZ great. It's been up and running for a while now. Any news on it being used for stuff other than DW?
You can use the platform on Dazah.com directly. Aside from that, we got stuck having to wait for the patent before being able to publish what we were doing to get others on board.
Tomorrow I'll look into the link checker thing. I thought that was fixed as well.
As for the food analogy, imagine someone is in line at McD's. The attendant says to that person "what would you like?" and the person says "I want food". How likely is it that a satisfactory exchange will happen quickly?
That was me when I went to a food outlet called Subway some years ago with my son. The assitant didn't pigeonhole me as a moron, or speak to me harshly, nor did they patronise me. Why?
Because Subway knows that if they had been that way with me then I would not have returned to that particular outlet, neither would my son, nor very likely would good friends whom I would have related my miserable experience to in a very detailed manner. We would have gone elsewhere unless absolutely desperate... and if it would ever happen that we did get desperate enough to go back there for whatever reason then we would try to avoid the attention of that mardy assistant, or in and out as quickly as possible with as little interaction as possible.
Thankfully, Subway get so many customers that the newbies like me are not so common. Additionally, because of their patience my Subway-Fu is improving rapidly. Not only do I enjoy the food but I also enjoy the entire experience with family and friends.
Now look at it from the point of view of the people in line behind that "moron". If they have to repeatedly waste their time waiting for these obliviots to be served won't they be more likely to take their business to another establishment?
Furthermore, in most fast food places, the menu is prominently displayed so you can browse it while waiting in line. How many time have you seen someone get to the front of the line and then look up at the menu saying "let's see....". If you are in a face-to-face conversation I can see asking a not quite thought-out question. But when you have the time to compose your thoughts and ask a question online, there is no reason not to put some thought into composing a coherent question.
Millenials and the younger generation (essentially, everyone younger than 35 years old) went through their teenage years in the Internet era. Today, the very vast majority date online. They meet people online. They ask people out on dates online. They get to know potential significant others online. They enter into relationships online. They maintain friendships online. They break up online. They take classes online and engage with their teachers and professors online. They search for jobs online, and, if they're lucky, they may even get hired online. Quite realistically speaking, online chat is their primary form of communication, and has been throughout their teenage years and beyond.
If you are in a face-to-face conversation I can see asking a not quite thought-out question. But when you have the time to compose your thoughts and ask a question online, there is no reason not to put some thought into composing a coherent question.
This may be the way that you see it and think of it. But for everyone who went through their teenage and later years online, they treat every word of online communication with the same amount of deliberate thought and intent as you treat your primary form of communication.
"1337 speak" / chat speak was born because people were unable to type as fast as they could speak aloud, and as online chat slowly became the new primary form of communication for the younger generation, a shorthand way of communicating evolved to compensate for the lack of speed at which one could get out their thoughts. Here on DaniWeb, we frown upon chat speak because, as a global and multi-generational community, it's difficult to understand what people are saying, and can even sometimes come across as disrespectful. However, beyond that, keep everything else I've written here in mind ... or offer a rebuttal ;)
they treat every word of online communication with the same amount of deliberate thought and intent as you treat your primary form of communication.
When I'm shooting the sh!t with my friends, then, yes, you are probably correct. But shooting the sh!t is not my primary mode. The problem is when these same people communicate as if all conversations should be had on that level. When someone is seeking my assistance I expect a higher level of conversation than "Dude. Code broak. Plz hlp."
Did purple feature heavily in those Designs by Dani, Dani? :-)
Of course! Every design was a variation of purple and blue, same as today.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010406122919/http://dazah.com:80/portfolio.html
Where's the sick parrot yellow gone? I did like that.
When I search a simple solution StackOverflow is the best answer to Google and to me , simple answers and a good (not great) voting system. But you don't ever bother beating this. If it is a forum it will go in discussion and comments about how this can be done. DaniWeb should be a programmers forum. It doesn't feel like , it feels like “tell us your problem and we will try to solve it”. I proposed years back to have languages separate forum threads (and not this that killed the PHP community), to make some main questions that seems to trouble that language world and to have competitions , news of the language , to build a real community. You destroyed the communities without replacement.
Its only the issue of how someone will first will be here , the real question you can ask is why she / he should stay.
It is in your hand to reconstruct it
I too believe it was a catastrophic mistake to trash the language-specific forums. Anyone looking at the remaining programming forum will quickly see that we don't do Java, just PHP, SQL, Python, C*. I don't believe tha the complete collapse of Java activity is entirely due to Google's malevolance, or the low qualiy of what we did. It's also because we longer promote ourselves as having any interest in or comittment to Java. (Substitute your own preferred technology here)
Do you really think that if people can't even be bothered to post in the Programming section that they'd bother to post in a specific language forum?
People post in the community forum because that is the default when you hit the 'contribute' button from the home page. To post elsewhere they need to click on the 'do something else instead' button which doesn't really make it clear, in my opinion, that they should be doing this if they want to post in another forum. I'd prefer no default and a dropdown forum list. At least that way they would be forced into thinking about where they post.
Do you really think that if people can't even be bothered to post in the Programming section that they'd bother to post in a specific language forum?
My point was that in the absence of any visible interest or activity in Java people are (a) unlikely to find us via a Java keyword search and (b) unlikely to start a Java-related topic.
I do remember that when we had a Java forum people posted in it. Lots of them.
The old forum system seemed to be flagging. The hybrid system was developed and it's now on its last few breaths. Not sure if it worked or if it managed to kill off DW ahead of time. I originally hated the hybrid, then thought it was OK, now back to thinking was a load of tosh.
I do remember that when we had a Java forum people posted in it. Lots of them.
And then Stack Overflow and Reddit and Gitter were born.
And then Stack Overflow and Reddit and Gitter were born.
Stack overflow 2008
Reddit 2005
Gitter 2014
Correction ... not when they were born, but rather when they began to gain serious traction, and when Google decided to modify their algorithms to favor them over indy forums.
o what would you do if a Googler suddenly chimed in and said "Yes, I confirm we've rolled out the Ghost Update in November 2011" - would that help you in any way? And no, everything that is coming up here doesn't even faintly look like "a penalty", all I can see is perhaps a little algorithmic tweak of ranking logics regarding low quality UGC - nothing the users seem to have the slightest problem with (sockpuppet and buddy opinions excluded). I've seen several comments now on stackoverflow being way better than daniweb, so all this seems to be nothing but a little UDC - a user driven change.
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this.
We were not hit by a penalty; Of that, I am sure. We were hit by an algorithm update that affected a lot of UGC content, most notably, tech-based forums. All tech-based forums were hit at the same time. At the same time as all tech forums were pushed down, StackOverflow was pushed up. There's another thread about this somewhere around here, but the main point is that StackOverflow is very heavily curated and moderated in such a way to be designed to put searchers first. This provides a great experience for Google users, and therefore Google notices and sends more traffic to the site that would be the best experience for them.
The problem is that, for better or for worse, us forums are left having to reinvent our models in order to compete. It's not that our forum has any worse content than any other tech forum out there. It's simply that discussion forums, as a whole, are not as great an experience for Google searchers as Q&A sites are.
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