

Why Gnip Will Displace Google - Push Model - mathewgj
http://mattishness.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-gnip-will-displace-google.html

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maxklein
This is not the core problem of search. The problem with search is that
nowadays, google rarely finds what I'm looking for. When I search for the same
terms I used to search for earlier, google always shows me 'likely' results.
I.e, if I search for example for 'window handle', a few years ago, this would
almost certainly show a bunch of programming results. Nowadays, the search
result is very different, and a lot less relevant to what I'm looking for.

This is where search has to be fixed. When I type window handle, I want a
HWND. When a builder types 'window handle', his first result should be a local
store where he can buy window handles or descriptions of window handles.

That's where search has to be fixed, not in crawling.

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rms
Do you have personalized search turned on?

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maxklein
Yes, it's slightly better with it, but not much. For me, google really sucks.

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jhickner
This seems more like a competitor to RSS than a replacement for Google. It
doesn't seem like it has anything to do with Google at all, really.

Google needs to spider because the websites themselves can't be trusted to
give Google accurate listings.

RSS is another animal, though, because users opt-in by subscribing. Apples and
oranges, I think.

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JoelSutherland
Why Gnip Won't Displace Google:

Pinging/Pushing is a feature and if it can generate better results Google is
best positioned to implement it by combining that data with their existing
index and infrastructure.

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ojbyrne
How is gnip (as described here anyway) different from the various ping
services that appeared in the 2001-2004 timeframe, all of which failed to
displace google?

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snprbob86
But Google is already a hybrid model. The article even mentions AdSense, but
completely ignores the Toolbar, Analytics, Ajax APIs, etc. etc. etc.

Push or pull, Google is absorbing URLs to crawl and index at a rate which no
start up could match. Eventually, someone may dethrone Google, but it
certainly won't be a tiny startup.

Also, there is a significant portion of the web that could never be educated
enough to ping some server. This approach is doomed to failure without a
Crawler. That's not to say that there might not be interesting applications of
their technology is news analysis or aggregation.

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froo
I really think the idea of pushing/pinging search engines to come get content
should really be linked to the sitemaps protocol if anything, to me that seems
the most logical solution.

Basically, your main sitemap file would consist of a sitemapindex which then
links to at least 2 more separate files. The first being your recently updated
list that gets flushed when a search engine hits your site, and the rest
containing a full index of the content on your site.

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jacobscott
Pull or push, a good search engine still needs a local copy of the web, and
this is expensive. With a spider, search engines control in detail how they
get content. With push-via-notification, websites get much of this power. Is
this something that Google wants to give up?

Finally, if you're going to turn off your spider, /everyone/ better be pushing
to you. So this seems more likely to be next-next-next generation.

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zandorg
I don't quite understand Gnip, but Brewster Kahle's WAIS has/had each machine
offering its own results from its own personal database.

I believe Gene Kan (RIP) also had this in mind with his Gnutella work.

I also wanted to build a system based around Gnutella, searching text
documents across a whole P2P network, but nobody in the Gnutella community
wanted to adopt my ideas.

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olavk
Intersting article that first states a problem (bad search ranking on heavily
SEO'ed terms) and then proposes a "solution" (push data to google rather than
google pulling data from the site) that doesn't have anything to do with the
problem.

Push-to-google might be useful for providing more up-to-date search results,
though.

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DaniFong
Why wouldn't push models be vulnerable to SEO -- in what would essentially
amount to a DDOS attack?

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peregrine
Sure Gnip will displace Google............if everyone uses gnip on their
site....BUT WAIT then Google will just make their own gnip.

Wow this is such an idiotic post.

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mattmaroon
Next up, Why Apples Will Displace Oranges

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trezor
_Contrastingly, if you subscribe to a blog, you get pushed a notification
whenever that blog is updated_

Err. No. You have a RSS client which regularly pull. It's exactly the same
thing. Either the guy has no idea what he is talking about, or he is really
bad at making examples.

 _In a Gnip world, every website would have a feed – whenever content changes
– the index gets pinged._

Right. So it was _probably_ just a bad examaple, even though I have my doubts.
Still doesn't google more or less have this feature trough it's webmaster
tools?

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quasimojo
but the webmasters have to know gnip exists.

the webmasters need to know how to turn the switch to publish a feed delta, or
even write this themselves

with google or ysearch, you just publish and wait for the crawler to find you

the zero-effort solution always wins

