Searching for Alternatives
By: Alexandra Wharton
Art by Jason Raish
To find information online, users are increasingly going to sites that are alternatives to traditional search engines.
It was a cold night in
Pennsylvania when Leila Crooks was on Digg.com,
the community-based popularity site, and came across a story about a "slanket"
– a fleece blanket with sleeves that offers the freedom of arm movement so people can play video games or surf computers while snuggling under a blanket. Crooks was intrigued, bought one, loved it and sent the link to three of her friends who all bought them. At $50 a pop, the maker of the Slanket was benefiting from Digg.
The number of sites for finding information online – that are alternatives to search engines – is growing and the traffic to them is increasing. People go to them for different reasons: to find experts who can provide the best possible information, to have material presented in a different way, to see what other users value as important and to find information they know will be relevant to them specifically.
The Slanket example illustrates the difference between search (or "recovery") and discovery. Search (or recovery) is when you are looking for something specific – a confirmation of information that you know already exists, such as information about the governor of New Jersey or a recipe for meatloaf. Discovery is when you find something you were previously unaware of, weren't specifically looking
for or didn't know that you'd have an interest in. It's akin to reading additional stories in the newspaper because of the proximity to the article you wanted to read.
Amanda Watlington, founder of Searching for Profit, says social media sites like Del.icio.us or Reddit.com are organized to present information in different ways, which can appeal to people "depending on how their brains work." Users go to the Most Popular section of these sites and check out what others deem to be interesting.
Internet marketer Carsten Cumbrowski says he passes time on StumbleUpon.com, a
browsing engine, to find sites that other online marketers find useful as well as to find sites that entertain him. He says it has a good filtering system – "if I say I don't like something, I never get anything similar again."
Online marketers that want to leverage StumbleUpon can try its advertising system,
which includes the link of the advertiser's website in the regular StumbleUpon rotation. When a sponsored site is shown, a green button on the toolbar appears. However, some advertisers who have placed requests to get visitors in their category have received notices from StumbleUpon that there are not a sufficient number of people to view the ad in the category selected. Skeptics wonder if this is because StumbleUpon does not want to deal with a low ad spend or if they are overstating their traffic numbers.
Cutting Through the Clutter
As users become savvier in locating information, they realize that search engines are heavily monetized and loaded with nearly as many marketing messages as sought-after
information, and they seek out alternatives, according to Sam Harrelson, general manager of the East Coast U.S., for Clicks2Customers.
Others agree that "less noise" and the struggle to find relevant information on search engines often lead people to alternative sites.
For example, if users are looking for tax help, they might go to Digg and read an article like "five ways to get your taxes done" rather than entering "tax help" into a search engine, which yields promotional sites about tax services, according to Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, an Internet marketing company.
Users often go to review or opinion sites to find information to complement what they have found on search engines. Winfield says he will search Google for a dentist in New York to get some names and then go to Yelp.com to look at their reviews. Searching
for Profit's Watlington says she searches for hotels in New York and then goes to TripAdvisor.com for the reviews.
Tim Mayer, vice president of product management of search at Yahoo, explains that when users don't find the answers they want on search engines, they can ask a question
on Answers.com. The site includes 4 million answers from publishers, original content created by its editorial team, community-contributed articles from Wikipedia and answers from WikiAnswers.com.
WikiAnswers is collaboratively written by volunteers "in the spirit of growing information
for the public good," according to its website. For contributions that users find to be worthwhile, users vote with Trustpoints, which are indicators of how trusted the last contributor is as a member of the WikiAnswers community (as opposed to a measurement of how much you can trust the actual answer to a question).
Trusting a user's reputation is vital to not only WikiAnswers but to all social sites where users provide information or indicate the value of information (such as through tagging, bookmarking or ranking).
Just like in off-line world, the value put on information depends on who is giving it, and for this reason, users' profiles can be weighty and influential. If you are reading an article about JavaScript on Del.icio.us, you look to see what other articles a user has saved – it gives you an understanding of that person's knowledge
base. It is similar to looking at someone's book or record collection – it lends credibility and perspective.
Trust Me
Techmeme.com is one of online marketing expert Jim Kukral's favorite sites because
it decides what news is important as opposed to a site that simply aggregates feeds. "Techmeme saves me time. There is no need to go to a ton of blogs to figure out what is going on. That's power to me," he says.
Techmeme works differently than other news sites. GoogleNews, a news aggregator
site, uses its own software to determine what stories to display, but the sources are selected by a team of editors. Similarly, SFGate.com, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, also features stories decided on by editors.
Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera explains that Techmeme uses a proprietary algorithm,
which changes frequently, to analyze posts to determine what Web pages are being discussed or cited most often on the Web.
Blogger Robert Scoble (www.Scobleizer.com) explains that Rivera started by selecting
1,000 of the world's top tech bloggers, put them in his server, studied their linking behavior and created a "fabric" that now includes thousands of blogs and websites. When Apple's iPhone came out, high-profile bloggers in the fabric such as Michael Arrington (www.TechCrunch.com), Guy Kawasaki (http://blog.guykawasaki.com) and Scoble were all blogging about the new device. Continued on Page 2...
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