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September 28, 2004

Bob Massa on search engines

A thread at the Search Engine Watch forums raised the subject of a "Scalable Topic-Based Open Source Search Engine", and the methods being mooted for developing a more relevant algorithm.

Somewhere among the tracking of information on what the project was up to, and what bots were used - which can be found in this thread here - Bob Massa, of SearchKing fame, suddenly stepped in and stated a couple of home-truths that absolutely require repeating here.

When someone on the thread asked (regarding an open source search engine): "How would they deal with the fact that people would look at the algo and optimize for it though?"

That is how it should of been from the very beginning. Optimizing your site should not be a bad thing. Every webmaster SHOULD optimize their sites. Optimizing your site does not a spammer make. Optimizing your site just makes you a better webmaster.

Making up and changing the rules of the game and then penalizing people for breaking self-serving guidelines is what should have been recognized as the problem all along. It never had to be that way. It could have all been looked at differently right from the start. We, as an industry, have tried to commit virtual hari-kari on ourselves by sitting idle and allowing major corporate propaganda machines to cause us to divide against ourselves."
- Bob Massa

Posted by brian_turner at September 28, 2004 06:16 PM

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