The Puzzle

[Chris Boggs]

Please comment on my latest article found here (http://www.sempo.org/articles/puzzle.php) or here (http://www.instantposition.com/website-promotion/ranking.cfm).

I hope this one will survive, as the ABC's of Outsourcing Thread seems to have mysteriously disappeared after I gave a bad rep to a Moderator :p

[AussieWebmaster]

Interesting read.... and hey what's a delete here or there.

[orion]

I have read with great interest your article, Chris. Overall is a good piece, well and fair balanced. It is good to see someone reminding us the bigger picture from time to time.

I only have a little thingy, but is not a biggie, as is a matter of programming; it is just the line that reads.

"If you simulate Dr. Nielsen's test and ask someone to find a product price or a service description on your site, can they do it with ease? If not, chances are that the all-important spiders cannot either"

Software performance (in this case a spider finding things) is a programming issue, not an usability issue. I doubt all-important spider cannot find what humans cannot find. Many are designed precisely for this purpose (find what humans cannot find). I know you are trying to emphasize usability but others could mistake this for something else.


Other than this, I do recommend others your article.


Orion

[Chris Boggs]

I only have a little thingy, but is not a biggie

sorry but I couldn't help quoting that :D


"If you simulate Dr. Nielsen's test and ask someone to find a product price or a service description on your site, can they do it with ease? If not, chances are that the all-important spiders cannot either"

Software performance (in this case a spider finding things) is a programming issue, not an usability issue. I doubt all-important spider cannot find what humans cannot find. Many are designed precisely for this purpose (find what humans cannot find). I know you are trying to emphasize usability but others could mistake this for something else.

I am curious as to why you would say that spiders are designed to find what humans cannot. I thought that their purpose was to simulate a human searching and indexing content?

I agree that perhaps I could have worded the answer to my question a little differently. But I stand by the statement because this was under the SEO section instead of the Usability section of my article. I think I should have been more clear, but since my last article was about outsourcing SEO, I didn't want to "beat a dead horse" with this article.

[orion]

I am curious as to why you would say that spiders are designed to find what humans cannot. I thought that their purpose was to simulate a human searching and indexing content?

Sure. I'm happy to clarify this.

Trying to simulate a human searching for information is harder than what we think. A crawler merely finding objects (links, images, tags, etc, specific pieces of hard-to-find text within bulky databases) are easy to build, even easier for a single document.

I have designed many, customized to my heart or client needs. Still I haven't found the best way for simulating human searching (relevancy and human intention is one aspect of the problem).

Incidentally, while typing these lines I'm building a search crawler for finding on-topic terms within hidden text and text-type "images" (a kind of steganographic sport). I can see, find, and indexing them quite on the fly. Still is not human searching and indexing.

Orion

[Chris Boggs]

thanks Orion...I'd hit you with some rep but I have to "spread some around" first :D