

Would anyone even notice if search engines only indexed the top million sites? - taxonomyman
http://www.milliontall.com/about.html

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tzs
I once wrote up a short description of how to beat a certain puzzle. For "how
to beat X" where X is the name of the puzzle, my page is #1 in both Google and
Bing, and has been for years. Top 10 when "beat" is replaced with "solve" or
"win at".

My site is nowhere near the top million, so anyone having trouble remembering
my solution who went searching for it would notice if only the top million
sites were indexed.

BTW, the reason I am not naming the puzzle in this post is because I've done
no SEO on the page, and I think I've only posted links to it maybe once or
twice, 7 or 8 years ago, in comments on Slashdot or usenet. According to
Google, no one links to it. Yet somehow the search engines found it, and
decided it was the most relevant page for beating X. I'm curious to see how
long that continues, and don't want to do anything to disturb the natural
traffic.

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Jesse_Ray
I visit many unpopular websites, often through search engines, such as to find
out little details about video games, techniques for DIY organic lawncare,
concepts used in unconventional programming languages, explanations of physics
and philosophy from retired university professors, and many other things that
have even less popularity, such as learning how to speak and write in the
dialects of English called E-Prime and P-Prime. The probability that the top
one million websites would include all of the websites that I use is very
nearly 0%, so the probability that I would notice is near 100%.

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recursive
My gut reaction is yes, people would notice. Many people have interests or
hobbies in niche areas. It may not be the majority, but I believe a
significant proportion of useful search results come from the long tail.

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DanielOcean
I just Googled for, "How to do funny looking e on Mac" and got the answer I'm
looking for.. like @recursive mentioned, a "significant proportion of useful
search results come from the long tail."

Oh btw, é!

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harlanlewis
This is very confusing. The product description & apparent functionality
completely contradict how the press describes it:

Product description:

> "allows you to ONLY OBTAIN search results from up to the top 1 million
> websites (or top 100k, 10k, 1k, 100) sites."

Representative press clipping from the same page:

> "Making the Web wild again: New search engine ignores popular websites"

~~~
cypherpunks01
Yeah, there are two "experiments":

<http://www.millionshort.com> (the original)

and

<http://www.milliontall.com> (this new one)

~~~
waterhouse
The <title> of this page (<http://www.milliontall.com/about.html>) is
"MillionShort". A bit confusing. I'm guessing someone did some copy-pasting.

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tthomas48
My theater company's Facebook page shows up so I guess people could still find
us, but it's hardly the best way. My open source project shows up only because
of my resume. I wouldn't use this. It finds stuff, but it's pretty much always
the least relevant link.

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jpike
I'd notice it during googling of my own projects to find out how popular they
are. Sometimes I think nothing I ever write will be as popular as the program
that let people beat neopets.

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nzealand
How do you determine the top million sites if you don't index all the sites?

