Category: Web

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

That bastard Google warp-around nofollow rears its ugly little head again, this time with Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, chief Pedian has issued a proclamation that Wikipedia outgoing links will now be labeled with ‘nofollow’, as a measure to prevent link spam.

seomoz.org seems to think this is a good thing:

What will be interesting to watch is how it really affects Wikipedia’s spam problem. From my perspective, there may be slightly less of an incentive for spammers to hit Wikipedia pages in the short term, but no less value to serious marketers seeking to boost traffic and authority by creating relevant Wikipedia links.

Philipp Jenson is far less sanguine, writing:

What happens as a consequence, in my opinion, is that Wikipedia gets valuable backlinks from all over the web, in huge quantity, and of huge importance – normal links, not “nofollow” links; this is what makes Wikipedia rank so well – but as of now, they’re not giving any of this back. The problem of Wikipedia link spam is real, but the solution to this spam problem may introduce an even bigger problem: Wikipedia has become a website that takes from the communities but doesn’t give back, skewing web etiquette as well as tools that work on this etiquette (like search engines, which analyze the web’s link structure). That’s why I find Wikipedia’s move very disappointing.

Nick Carr agrees writing:

Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any.

Seth Finkelstein notices something else: WIKIPEDIA IS NOT AN ANARCHY! THERE IS SOMEBODY IN CHARGE!

The rel=”nofollow” is a web extension I despise, and nothing in the time it was first released–primarily because of weblog comment spam–has caused me to change my mind. As soon as we saw it, we knew the potential existed for misuse and people have lived down to my expectations since: using it to ‘punish’ web sites or people by withholding search engine ranking.

Even when we feel justified in its use, so as to withhold link juice to a ‘bad’ site (such as the one recently Google bombed that had misleading facts about Martin Luther King) we’re breaking the web, as we know it. There should be no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to an item showing up on a search list: if one site is talked about and linked more than another, regardless of the crap it contains, it’s a more topically relevant site. Not authoritative, not ‘good’, not ‘bad’, not definitive: topically relevant.

(Of course, if it is higher ranked because of Google bombing of its own, that’s a different story, but that’s not always the case.)

To return to the issue of Wikipedia and search engine ranking, personally I think one solution to this conundrum would be to remove Wikipedia from the search results. Two reasons for this:

First, Wikipedia is ubiquitous. If you’ve been on the web for even a few months, you know about it and chances are when you searching on a topic, you know to go directly to Wikipedia to see what it has. If you’ve been on the web long enough, you also know that you have to be skeptical of the data found, because you can’t trust the veracity of the material found on Wikipedia. I imagine that schools also provide their own, “Thou shalt not quote Wikipedia”, for budding young essayists.

Reason one leads to reason number two: for those folks new to this search thing, ending up on Wikipedia could give them the impression that they’ve ended up with a top-down authority driven site, and they may put more trust into the data than they should. After all, if they’re not that familiar with search engines, they certainly aren’t familiar with a wiki.

Instead of in-page search result entries, Google, Yahoo, MSN, any search engine should just provide a sidebar link to the relevant Wikipedia entry, with a note and a disclaimer about Wikipedia being a user-driven data source, and how one should not accept that this site has the definitive answer on any topic. Perhaps a link to a “What is Wikipedia?” FAQ would be a good idea.

Once sidebarred, don’t include Wikipedia in any search mechanism, period. Don’t ‘read’ its pages for links; and discard any links to its pages.

Wikipedia is now one of those rare sources on the web that has a golden door. In other words, it doesn’t need an entry point through a search engine for people to ‘discover’ it. If anything, its appearance in search engine results is a distraction. It would be like Google linking to Yahoo’s search result of a term, or Yahoo linking to Google’s: yeah, we all know they’re there but show me something new or different.

More importantly, Wikipedia needs to have “Search Engine General’s” warning sticker attached to it before a person clicks that link. If it continues to dominate search results, we may eventually get to the point where all knowledge flows from one source, and everyone, including the Wikipedia folks, know that this is bad.

This also solves the problem about Wikipedia being a Black hole, as well as the giving and taking of page rank: just remove it completely from the equation, and the issue is moot.

I think Wikipedia is the first non-search engine internet source to truly not need search engines to be discovered. As such, a little sidebar entry for the newbies, properly annotated with a quiet little “there be dragons here” warning, would eliminate the spam problem, while not adding to a heightened sense of distrust of Wikipedia actions.

One other thing worth noting is is seomoz.org’s note about a link in Wikipedia enhancing one’s authority: again, putting a relevant link to Wikipedia into the search engine sidebars, with a link to a “What is Wikipedia?” FAQ page, as well as the dragon warning will help to ‘lighten’ some of the authority attached to having a link in the Wikipedia. Regardless, I defer to Philipp’s assertion that Wikipedia is self-healing: if a link really isn’t all that authoritative, it will be expunged.

Post wasn’t pulled, just not propagated across all the data centers. Did I happen to mention I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for the last few days? Disregard the paranoia.

However, there is a silver lining. Thanks to Seth for pointing out this Google data center tool. Put in the search term, and then switch among the data centers.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Writing Learning JavaScript and now Adding Ajax, as well as creating web page applications such as my photo popup has led me to an epiphany: Microsoft really doesn’t want us to use IE. No, I’m not being facetious–the company would probably prefer that people move to another browser.

Let’s look at the facts.

First, web developers must add additional tweaks in scripting code and CSS in order for web applications to work with IE7; yet no specialized code or CSS is required for other web browsers. Now, why release a new version of a browser that’s guaranteed to be incompatible with all other browsers? It’s not as if any of the technologies are new: most have been out for five or more years.

Backwards compatibility doesn’t explain this deliberate nonalignment. One can continue to support something like attachEvent while adding support for addEventListener using application wrappers. Developers have been providing backwards compatible wrappers in code for years. I can’t believe that the Microsoft developers aren’t familiar with this technique. It shouldn’t be a burden within the code, yet keeping something like a proprietary event system just continues to add developer aggravation, as well as adding to the number of sites that break.

IE7 is also a nag. So much so that I’ve finding I can’t load applications, visit pages, do much of anything without some warning or another popping up. It nags constantly, and much of this can’t seem to be turned off. It’s wearying to use IE7–it is not an unobtrusive element of the web browsing experience.

Then there’s the new, ‘helpful’ way to test in both IE 6 and IE7–Microsoft is providing a Virtual PC image preloaded with XP and 6 just so you can test your pages with IE 6, while having IE 7 loaded on your regular installation.

No need to buy a license for XP within the VPC image. How sweet. But you do have to load an application that loads another version of the operating system in memory, just so you can test a web browser. A web browser! I don’t know about all the people who are tossing flowers at Microsoft’s feet for this ‘kind’ gesture, but this ‘workaround’ is an insult to web developers, and a mockery of the concept of a browser–you know that simple yet powerful application that opens the world but leaves a small footprint? Yeah, that browser.

According to the IE weblog, this VPC image will only function until April 1st, 2007, but I think the April Fool’s joke is getting people to reserve both memory and disc space–as well as having to go through Microsoft’s validation process–just to test against a browser. What happens after April, then? Are all the Windows 2000 installations going away? There will be no need to test for IE6?

Add it all up, and I think the facts equal Microsoft making a strategic decision to phase out Internet Explorer.

Microsoft was challenged back in 1994/1995 by an upstart company that said the web and its browser would eventually replace the need for an operating system like Microsoft’s Windows. Microsoft couldn’t let that slide, came out with IE, and proceeded to blow the doors off of Netscape’s Navigator.

Once the house of Netscape began to crumble and fail, and more importantly, once the browser space began to develop an open source following with the Mozilla effort, Microsoft lost interest in the browser space. The company’s bread and butter is based on operating system, Office and entertainment applications, and developer tools–not browsers.

IE has also been plagued for years with security flaws; flaws costing the company time and effort, true, but more importantly, costing the company credibility. The security flaws associated with Windows do not get the media play that security flaws with IE get. As such the issues of security associated with IE potentially could impact on the perception of the company’s new golden goose, Vista. There is no such thing as a 100% secure browser–so why take the chance? Drop the browser, and push the burden off on other browsers, while the company touts the security of it’s new and improved operating system.

You can see the seeds of IE’s growing lack of fit with Microsoft global strategy in the choice of Ray Ozzie as lead tech architect for the company. Ozzie is not a web man. His background is in distributed computing, not web services; his focus is going to be on applications built on Windows OS, based on Windows development architecture, and locking customers in to Windows OS–not the free for all that is the web.

Microsoft doesn’t need to prove a dominance in the browser space anymore. If it needed to do that, it would have released a more complete browser–and it would have issued new releases more regularly. It definitely wouldn’t have released the application so encumbered that one has to load a VPC image just to test new browser releases.

IE is an anchor now. It brings in no accolades to the company, and gets little respect. It costs money, though, and associates security problems with the Microsoft name. Solution: get people off of IE, and for those that stubbornly persist in using IE, put so many security roadblocks in the way that there is absolutely no chance the company can be held accountable for any security violation through IE.

Why else would the company release a new version of the browser with so many glaring and obvious incompatibilities with other browsers? Why else make it virtually impossible to visit any web site, without running against multiple warnings and blocks? Why else make it so difficult to test existing and new versions of the browser, that you have to run a completely new OS image?

Microsoft management must want people off of IE.

An update on my recent difficulty with Amazon: I received the product, but the company still showed it as ‘in process’, to be shipped in January. It took four emails and finally a phone call to get this one removed so that I wouldn’t get shipped another.

On the other hand, when we opened the second season of a TV show my roommate purchased (through my account), we found three duplicate disk 1′s and a missing disk 2. Since we had bought the series over two months ago, I wasn’t expecting Amazon to replace it, but they did–sending out a replacement season via 1 day shipping, and a pre-paid mailer to return the defective one. Now that was good customer service.

Unlike that shown at Best Buy: Recently, a Missouri couple bought an expensive camcorder, but when they got it home and opened the box, they found a jar of pasta sauce instead. $1600.00 for a jar of pasta sauce was a bit much. The Best Buy store would not provide a replacement, and eventually Sony ended up replacing the camcorder because of the publicity. Sony did make a point that the only reason they stepped in was Best Buy wouldn’t–there was no way this item would be shipped as it was, because the camcorder comes from Japan, and that type of pasta sauce is rare in Japan.

According to another St. Louis Today story, this is typically the result of a ‘returned item’ scam, where a person buys a new item, replaces it with worthless items of equal weight, tapes up the box and returns the item for a refund. The store’s employees don’t have the time (or don’t take the time) to ensure it is the proper item returned, and just restocks the item.

Many stores will make good when this happens, but I gather from a few of the more coherent entries in a discussion thread, Best Buy is not one of them. In fact, from the stories, I gather that Best Buy thinks if you sell something cheap enough, you don’t need to provide customer service. I’ve not had problems with Best Buy purchases, but I have returned an item and noticed that the customer service person did not check to ensure what I returned was the actual item. Before you ask, no it was not a camcorder.

A good rule of thumb seems to be if you’re making a closed box purchase at Best Buy, for yourself or as a present for someone else, you might want to open the box and check the contents before you leave the store. In fact this is good advice for buying more expensive electronics at any store: open the box, make sure everything is there before you leave the store. Oh, and try not to get arrested for having a big knife or box cutters along.

Another person in the thread mentioned about having problems with Sears. I stopped shopping at Sears when I read the story of the company sending a representative to a bankruptcy proceeding in order to demand that the used toaster and other items of this nature bought on a Sears credit card be returned.