Search Engine People

It's nice to see this kind of contest but the topic just sets me off on a much-needed rant.

The moderator situation on Stackoverflow is getting out of control. I see a Q&A site as having three main groups:

1. People who ask questions;

2. People who answer questions; and

3. People who edit/moderate questions.

Even 2+ years ago there was a lot of lip service paid to the value of (3). I disagreed then and it's only been reaffirmed by subsequent events. To be clear: it's not that I think these functions have no value, it's that they are, at best, secondary to content creation.

The problem is that these roles without diligent oversight attract the wrong kinds of people (eg [1] [2] and a scandal a few years about an admin black list that I can't seem to find right now).

Take this question from Stackoverflow: Database development mistakes made by application developers [3], a question I spent some time answering and that people seemed to appreciate the answer to (based on comments and 1000+ upvotes). It is closed as "not constructive". This is hardly a unique phenomenon. We've all seen many interesting questions posted here that are now closed or locked and who knows how many have been deleted.

The kind of person you end up is overly pedantic and a real stickler for an arbitrary set of rules.

Editors/moderators are the bureaucrats of the Internet.

As Oscar Wilde said, “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” [4]. These sorts of people…

The post you are replying to is poorly-worded.

I think the post is making reference to the "thing" which made Google stand out in a sea of existing search engines.

"Using the idea of relevancy, they built Google in a way that - in comparison to other search engines at the time - was simply better at connecting users with more pertinent results.

"A query typed in Google provided more utility and relevancy than did Excite, Yahoo and other search engines.

"To put it simply, Google had a superior product.

https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/125-why-google-won.html#:~:text=Technology,Yahoo%20and%20other%20search%20engines.

> .0001% of people who choose to block javascript

The measured number of browsers blocking JavaScript varies
between about 0.7% and 4% with an estimated global average
hovering around 1.5%. Here are some sources [1,2,3].

[1] https://www.cotsweb.com/blog/how-many-people-have-javascript-disabled-in-their-browsers-revisited-217.html

[2] https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/stats-no-javascript.html

[3] https://deliberatedigital.com/blockmetry/javascript-disabled

Meta-search is a type of search engine that goes way back. They avoid the cost of maintaining a full, search service by sending the query to all kinds of other search engines, running some analysis on their results, and presenting a condensed form to the user optionally with value adds. DuckDuckGo's value add is privacy. Here's some others to give you an idea for what they do:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/10-meta-search-engines-reviewed-and-compared.html

This is what we do with rootbuzz, and it works well.

You'll want to acquaint yourself with custom segments if you take this approach too.

custom segments (from the google knowledge base):

http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=108040

this blog post does a better job of explaining how to use them though imho:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/monitor-seo-projects-with-google-analytics-custom-segments.html

>0.01%

13%, actually, globally. 2% in the US (population of NYC):

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/stats-no-javascript.html

That doesn't even count people who use browsers which you haven't tested with obscure bugs, or people who have laggy and slow connections that also breaks or damages the functionality of your javascript heavy web app.