guff

SEO and its betters

I am officially finished with the topic. It’s become the new wallet expander for your everyday online snake oil peddler. It has bloggers spending more time on what the best keywords to use are, rather than the actual topic they’re writing about (really people, excellent content is the true key to opening those search engine doors). And anything sentient enough to spell it has an opinion on it.

If it wasn’t for SEO, there would be no splogs. I rest my case.

Really, enough already! Ok, rant done.

On the plus side of search engine topics today, I’m happy to see Mahalo is still building up. Here’s their FAQ, if you haven’t heard. Look at their page on WordPress. It’s almost all the things Yahoo! Directory tries to be, but isn’t — which is not a slam against Yahoo! It is what it is. It’s just not what I’m looking for.

Once upon a time, which would be the mid-nineties of the previous century, I went to work for an operation involved in a Big Changeover from a national (US) online service built around a text UI to one of the first few to offer full, graphical, unencumbered Internet access to its users. An ISP, basically. Not only that, all user services were to become net-based — well, web-based. Considering the competition (like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and The WELL, most now mere flickers of their former glory) with their various proprietary applications and such, it was a moderately daring but ultimately quite forward-thinking move. Especially considering when the Big Changeover first began, the plan was to duplicate the sorts of GUI-like environments already in existence. Why fix what works, right?

Ok, a lot of this back story is a topic for another post. What I’m leading into with it is, along with the previous text-based services users would now have access to through their web browser, a guide to the web was also in the works. A lot of time, money, personnel, and prime Manhattan real estate were put into an endeavour that would be called iGuide. (Go ahead and google it. There’s not much on it to be found, though a certain publication’s use of the name in the cable electronics realm denotes its corporate lineage). Despite my distaste for the name — I created not one but two intranet web sites mocking it — I had a great deal of faith in iGuide, which stumbled along on its own for a short time after the “web-based online service” failed to make its way out of testing. You really can throw too much money at a problem!

But here’s hoping Mahalo fails to go the way of iGuide. It’s not really much of a guide, lacking reviews or ratings of the listed sites, but the basic premise behind presenting hand-tooled, well organized search results fits into that same philosophy, which is to provide links to materials that have first been gone over by (hopefully trained) human eyes and brains. Despite my allegiance to our computer overlords [All Hail Colossus!], there is still something to say in defence of such a goal.