
What it looks like when Google links to your website - PeterRosdahl
http://raaw.se/2013/07/04/google-shuts-down-a-popular-service-and-links-to-your-website/
======
alainbryden
Congrats! I love alternativeTo. It's my way to train parents and friends to
find the best free alternatives to whatever ad-bloated software SEO'd their
way to the top of Google last time they decided they needed to convert a movie
or download music.

This simple piece of advice (and a bookmark in their favorite browser) has
greatly reduced the amount of PC rebuilding I've had to do for them over the
years!

~~~
raawmarkus
Thank you, that's so great to hear.

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imdhmd
hey alternativeTo team,

congratulations!

at this achievement, i hope you will put some effort (also) in improving the
UX of the site so that users like me get keep visiting whenever we want an
alternative.

Some observations (at [http://alternativeto.net/software/google-
reader/](http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/) page):

\- Ads are covering a large part of the area

\- The list of alternatives are not prominently visible (need to scroll down)

\- UI is a bit cluttered (offering too many options)

~~~
computer
One thing that's bothered me almost every time I visited your awesome site
over the last few years is that the link to the actual product is quite small
and hard to see, in both places.

For me personally a big "Go to site" button would make the site even nicer.

~~~
raawmarkus
Thanks, we'll be sure to think about how we can make this better. The
button/link is actually pretty big for all apps that don't have any additional
links (like to app stores). See AOL Reader as an example. Is that reasonable
or would you prefer something else?

[http://alternativeto.net/software/aol-
reader/](http://alternativeto.net/software/aol-reader/)

~~~
Raphmedia
Keep it simple.

I want a big, shiny button that links me to the content I want.

When I click on one of the software, I don't read the blue box. I scroll down
and then click on an alternative. Then "what the?! I'm on the same kind of
page again!" I scroll down, click on alternative... and repeat this again and
again. Oh! Now this page has a big green "download" button! Awesome! _click
it_ Oh. It's an ad.

This was my reaction when I first visited the website just now.

Make the main link bigger. If it has a download link, make it big. If it
doesn't? Make the website link bigger. I shouldn't have to think. I'm
confused.

(Of course, I'm dumbing myself down on purpose when testing websites)

~~~
raawmarkus
Thank you for great feedback, very much appreciated! We will definitely try to
make things very obvious when it comes to leaving our site for the final
destination that should be an applications website or an app store.

I also answered some of these thoughts in my reply to imdhmd.

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MichaelApproved
I'd like to hear how they were able to handle the dramatic increase in traffic
over such a short period of time.

~~~
bnchrch
With out getting to specific into their backend (because I dont know what
theirs is) I'd assume they must of prepared for Google Reader deadline

~~~
christiangenco
> Without getting too specific into their backend (because I dont know what
> theirs is) I'd assume they must have prepared for Google Reader's deadline

Assuming ESL; legitimately trying to be helpful :)

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aviraldg
<tangential>

"...AlternativeTo had about 217.000 visitors on that first day..."

Why can't we all agree upon a universal, consistent notation for math and
science?

</tangential>

~~~
dorfsmay
On a slightly different tangent, why do people put the dollar sign in front of
the numer?

~~~
aviraldg
Maybe because: $1 25¢

~~~
dorfsmay
So that's like writing: Kg 19 300 g

I understand it's tradition, but the fact that people keep using it kills me.
Especially when people start using kilo $, and in "$ 100K".

~~~
mortehu
Tip: It's written with a lower-case k. Capital K in front of B means 1024 to
some people (including me), but 1000 is always written as k.

~~~
dorfsmay
Thanks. You are correct about lower case k for kilo (but upper case for mega
and up), but the official unit for 1024 bytes is the kibibyte, which is KiB:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte)

~~~
mortehu
That's why I said "Capital K in front of B means 1024 _to some people_ ".

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mechatronic
When I saw the link on the "reader is dead" page, I thought oh man
alternativeTo is going to blow up... I hope they're ready.

~~~
tobeportable
I felt good for them. They really need more recognition.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I agree, it couldn't have happened to a nicer site.

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olegp
We've also had a lot of traffic to
[https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader](https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader) as
people look for Reader alternatives. Google should do this more often.

~~~
fourstar
What a great idea. They should make a website so that when people search it
gives them a suggestion of a site based on their query.

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ColinWright
Not sure you'll see this, but this is what your page looks like on my browser:

[http://www.livmathssoc.org.uk/images/AlternativeTo.png](http://www.livmathssoc.org.uk/images/AlternativeTo.png)

I have, of course, scrolled down past the image. It took some considerable
time before I realized there was any text there.

Just thought you'd like to know.

    
    
        Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) 
        Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
    

(don't ask)

~~~
raawmarkus
Hi Colin,

I just HAVE to ask :)

Anyway, that doesn't look good and I'm sorry for that. I use a Wordpress theme
that I bought and I guess it just doesn't support your browser.

~~~
ColinWright
In short ...

Some time ago I needed a machine that lets me browse the internet, write
programs, deal with email, connect with Skype, and run a small wiki. More, it
needed to have roughly an A5 footprint, more-or-less 210 mm x 150 mm. The Asus
Eeee running a variant of Linux fitted my needs perfectly. It has a perfectly
usable keyboard, and drives almost every projector without problem.

It's still running, and has now been extensively personalized. However,
upgrading the browser has repeatedly defeated me. Until recently that hasn't
been a problem, most website are still usable, although sometimes (but not
always!) the "mobile" version is better/more tolerant than the "desktop"
version. It's only in the last few months that there are web sites that simply
don't work. For them I often drop to a command line, pull the html directly,
post-process with a AWK script, and read the extracted text.

Interestingly, sometimes that's faster than my desktop rendering the full
page, with ads, images, and analytics slowing everything down.

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zmmmmm
I was pretty surprised to read that (apparently) Google did this without even
a heads up to alternativeTo. Seems like it would have at least been polite, if
nothing else ...

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joeblau
I wrote an open source project and when I landed on the first page of Google's
search results, my traffic spiked and continually stays at about 10k-15k
requests per week. Before hitting Google's first page of results, I was down
in the 1k-2k range.

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seagreen
Markus, what license is the content of AlternativeTo under? Have you
considered one of the Creative Commons licenses like Stack Overflow?

~~~
olaj
We haven't thought that much about it actually. The only experience I have
with it is that the whole web is filled with crappy spam sites that is using
the content from Stack Overflow to earn a few extra bucks and that is kind of
irritating.

Maybe someone has done something really useful with the data as well that i
don't know about though.

But if someone have any awesome idea and want to do something together we are
always listening :)

/Ola

~~~
seagreen
Spam sites are definitely a legitimate concern.

I really love the idea of AlternativeTo, but unfortunately don't feel
comfortable adding content unless my contributions will be under an open
license. So I'm not sure what great stuff could be done with the data (though
I bet there is something) but you might get more users if you go with a CC
license.

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ekr
Probably one of the reasons Google linked to them, is that they have so many
Google ads on their pages (3 of them - quite disturbing to me). And Google
takes about 32% of the price paid by the advertiser.

Just a back-of-the-envelope calculation: let's assume 217000 page views, with
a 1% CTR, and a 1$ CPC. The result (of that 1 day) : ~2000$.

~~~
proexploit
There's no way $2000 even factored into Google's decision of who to link to.

