DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Following up on Friday’s piece about the death of the web search industry, I discovered an excellent example of just how dismal the prospect of pay-to-play submissions can be.

Ask Jeeves and Teoma share this Site Submit page. It describes their fee-based submission tool with a few bullet-pointed features:

• “Submit up to 1,000 different URLs for inclusion”
• “One-time fee ensures a full year of inclusion in this powerful database”

They require the user to click through before they explain that the “one-time fee” is charged per URL. Meaning, if you follow their suggestion and submit 1,000 URLs, they’ll invoice you for — I’m not kidding — $18,012.

You need not ever refresh or update your pages; presumably they’ll index your stale old crap over and over again, all year, ensuring that the “latest, best content is always available to our users”. Or, as necessary, the outdated, uninteresting, poorly-formed content published by someone with $18,012 to blow.

(At this point I picture Jeeves standing insouciantly in his tuxedo, before an open bottle of chrome polish… in one hand he holds a chamois, in the other, a turd.)

Another day, another snapshot of nowhere-but-here… inside the “goddess store,” among the herbal aphrodisiacs, eclectic potions, and books about sensuality, I spied a glass jar labelled “Tangerine Love Balm.” And as I begin to imagine how this product would be used, I see a sticker on the cap reading SAMPLER.

Heh.

In November of 2000 I created a list of the add-URL forms for what I considered to be the major, free, general-purpose search engines. I used those links frequently to submit websites for indexing.

I don’t do much website promotion any more, so I have not had any need to maintain my bookmarks. But today I revisited the list. I found that only three of the seven still offer free submissions. I was surprised — I know the web industry has been decimated, but it was still a shock to see it up close.

These still work: Alta-Vista, Northern Light, and Google.

Excite and Go now use Overture, aka GoTo.com, the “search engine” of paid placements. HotBot accepts no submissions. Lycos charges a fee. Inktomi charges a fee.

Missing in action: InfoSeek was part of Go.com, but Disney pulled the plug after Go.com lost $1 Billion (!).

Promising newcomers Teoma and WiseNut have succumbed to acquisition; AskJeeves purchased Teoma (which now charges a fee for sumbissions); LookSmart purchased WiseNut although WiseNut still offers free sumbissions. (I don’t expect that to last. LookSmart charges for directory submissions.)

I’m not simply lamenting the end of the free. Rather, I think it is hugely valuable and important to be able to search an archive of websites indexed by relevance, not by bid. It’s apparently possible for software (e.g. google’s PageRank) to intelligently find relevant content — and that’s what I want to see. I’d even pay for the privilege. Just don’t serve me advertising and call it “search results.”

Which would you rather drink — water that has been processed to within angstroms of its life, through a million dollars’ worth of machinery and hauled by truck for 1000 miles, or fresh mineral water taken straight out of the ground in rural California, about 100' from where you drink it?

The answer, clearly, is the former. But I guess you’d want to see both waters before you decide.

On the left: a pristine, ultra-purified, $3 bottle of Penta Pro — clean, hyper-oxygenated, and free of every weird chemical you can think to worry about.

On the right: 12 oz. of my well water, bottled from the kitchen tap a few hours after a fumble-fingered technician ran an incomplete backwash cycle on my water softener.

A “backwash” is the process that reverses the water flow through the system, flooding out all the sediment that the filters have trapped. A complete backwash will dump all this iron, sand, various mineral nastiness, etc., into the waste pipe. The obvious problem with not allowing the backwash to complete is that all the stirred-up muck flushes not into the ditch, but into my house. Nice, eh?

The water cleared up by the next day. The technician had the good sense not to bill me, and I had the good sense not to invite him back to service my water softener again.

Matt Haughey has written recently about domain hijackings. In subsequent reading I discovered an interesting resource — the DMOZ archive of domain-dispute news stories, sorted by domain. To be clear, not all disputed domains are the result of hijackings; these are generally separate issues.

See also the disputes listing of the World Intellectual Property Organization, whose apparent mission is putting cyber-squatters out of business. The section entitled “Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith” in ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy delineates the conditions in which WIPO, as ICANN’s dispute-resolution division, determines whether a domain has been registered in bad faith.

Domain squatters are one of the lowest life forms that have achieved Internet access. I am happy to see a forum where they regularly lose claim to their assets.

Of course, the system is not perfect… sometimes there is no clear claim, as in the case of brown-shoes.com. In this dispute, the domain owner made a good case for the rights to the domain, a combination of generic words that forms a generic shoe-industry term, but which happens to be similar to a registered trademark (Brown Shoe Company Inc.). WIPO, perhaps too conditioned to side with large corporations (who most frequently are the folks who can afford to dispute domain ownership), forced transfer of the domain to Brown Shoe Company.