Ahhrrr... I looked at the page and though "Wow, I will finally do it... one day" and decided to add it to my Delicious account, only to realize it was already there.
And then it came to me: it was probably posted on HN few months ago, I decided to read it "later" and created that Delicious link :)
Summarizing: pollute the Internet with cheap content as hard as you possibly can and then "milk" it.
Assume my company has finally nailed the text recognition, I must tell you I'd be disappointed by having the need to employ $10/article English majors to keep my site "up to date".
The issue I'm having with SEO is this: if millions of fake articles/blogs didn't generate so much noise, my hypothetical speech recognition startup would have gotten a few rave reviews organically via handful of legit tech news outlets and that would be enough. But thanks to the current situation this won't be enough (I know from experience) - you need to spam the hell out of everybody to "be in".
I am sad watching Google losing the battle... It is beyond me how Digg pages (that only have a link!) show up higher in search results than the actual content they're pointed to?
Just yesterday I wanted to learn more about SAN storage and no matter what I searched for I could only get "buy! buy! buy!" links on Google's front page, until I retreated to wikipedia. Look at this crap (below), how could it possibly be included in the index, the text-to-link ratio (as well as text-to-dd) is horrendous, why not just ignore these?
Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
Ughh, easier to say than find! :) There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems". I like to ask entrepreneurs what are their thoughts on this intense cutthroat competition. The best answer/advice I've got so far was "Watch those who almost succeeded and learn from them".
Now I need to learn to distinguish between "failed" and "almost succeeded". :)
Also, can this be related to "idea vs execution" question? Finding an overlooked problem is an idea (very hard) and coming up with a _simple_ solution is "execution". Both are overwhelmingly hard to crack.
> There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems".
I don't think you have reason to be so pessimistic. Sal Khan, maker of Khan Academy, mentioned in an interview that while a lot of people were predicting that efforts like Khan Academy would spring up, in fact, there are very few of them that had. Sal is just one guy, who up until recently was working part-time and unfunded, who now has the largest private tutoring service in the world. This during a time when thousands of "smart" people funded by billions of dollars were ostensibly trying to do something similar. The number of people who actually start working on solutions is orders of magnitude smaller than people who are merely "looking for" solutions.
Maybe its for the best. I'm not a big fan of autotools, but proliferation of semi-compatible UNIXes was the reason behind this mess. I'd be absolutely happy with just Linux/BSD/Macs to worry about.
And then it came to me: it was probably posted on HN few months ago, I decided to read it "later" and created that Delicious link :)