Obviously, I think this is a good move. To recap switching to Yahoo for search would have alienated users because it’s a worse search engine, but more important would have overwritten people’s existing experience on upgrade.

In an email to the ubuntu-devel mailing list titled “Follow up to Default Search Provider Changes for 10.04” Rick Spencer writes:

Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu. Up until Ubuntu 9.10 these defaults have always been Firefox and Google. Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones.

However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider. I have asked the Ubuntu Desktop team to change the default back to Google as soon as reasonably possible, but certainly by final freeze on April 15th.

It was not our intention to “flap” between providers, but the underlying circumstances can change unpredictably. In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

All thanks the Ubuntu Masters!

Don’t Downgrade the Experience

He quotes Rick Spencer, Canonical:

No, this will effect [sic] upgrades if the computer is currently set to Google. This is not because of anything special for this particular change. This is because Ubuntu always changes to new defaults for users who are on old defaults.

Once I’ve installed software, it’s no longer “defaults”, it’s my experience. Any change to the experience better be to improve the experience, otherwise you jeopardize alienating me and your other customers.

It Can’t be About Money

The search engine in Firefox is Google because it’s the best (of the infants).

In my co-worker Noël Jackon’s post today “Art First”

I respect Jay-Z for his music, but love the man for his words.

via YouTube - “NY-Z” – An ABSOLUT Collaboration with Jay-Z.

At the Jay-Z saysat the 11:30 mark “it can’t be about money. There has to be something in there that is true to both sides. … when the align … At the end of the day no one loses when it’s like that.”

Stay true to yourself, and true to your customers.

I’m Staying Hopeful

Ubuntu has hugely help make Linux and open source flavors many more people can enjoy.

I’m staying hopeful that Ubuntu will stay focus on their customers’ experience!

In the meantime, I’m also staying pragmatic and swallowing bitter proprietary medicine everyday.

Having Fun

My co-worker Alex “Viper” today shared this parody of Jay-Z “Empire State of Mind” titled “Galactic Empire State of Mind” by College Humor:

Customers’ care about one thing, a good experience.

April 8th Update: Yahoo will not be the default search engine in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Related article “Ubuntu Linux Still Searching Google“

I read with interest Adam Freetly’s Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins and the discussion around it on weblog tools collection and other sites. It is a great list of plugins, but I have a problem with one of the plugins on the list, or the claims that people make about it anyway:

Google Sitemap Generator – The biggest benefit of using wordpress is the manual labor you save because the software already knows where all of your content is. This Plugin submits a comprehensive index of your site to google, yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com every time you update your site. It’s a huge boost to your site’s SEO. by Arne Brachhold

In my experience working with numerous clients, I’ve seen no benefit of having a site map, and the claim that it provides a huge boost to your site’s SEO is hollow.

If it does provide such a boost surely many people would have data to support this. I’ve seen nothing that supports these claims to my satisfaction.

Looking at sitemaps.org, the site sponsored by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft for this topic, the front page reads (emphasis mine):

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Reading more of the limited material on the site, the scenarios where a site map is most helpful is for a site where the content isn’t well linked, ie a bot can’t spider through all of your content. Sites where this is a problem are fundamentally broken, and you should look to change your information architecture or web site software (CMS). WordPress doesn’t suffer from this problem.

Sure, the search engines (Google in particularly) loves as much data as you will feed them.

As I said, in my experience a site map has provided no benefit to web traffic. In fact, people would scream blue murder if it, because search engines would be requiring sites to be constructed in a special way, instead of web site creators focusing on their content, and search engines focusing on returning the most relevant results.

I have tested Arne Brachhold’s Google Sitemap Generator and it is an excellent, well written plugin. No question about that. But it is still one more think that has to be installed, configured, maintained, and is not without overhead.

I’m filing this one, SEO alchemy.

I’m helping a friend with her web site, and she is already using phplist for her newsletter emailing. I haven’t really used similar software other than the general mailing list software like mailman and before that Majordomo.

I went to the phplist’s web site to learn more about it, and from there to the sponsors of it Tincan “a web solutions company”. Oh noes, look at all of the “sponsored links” at the bottom and none of them are nofollow. I have no idea, what Yellow Pages for each of those countries have to do with Tincan: “Web Hosting UK, Yellow Pages Italy, Yellow Pages Norway, Yellow Pages Finland, Yellow Pages Germany, Yellow Pages Sweden, Yellow Pages Denmark, Yellow Pages France, Yellow pages Spain, Yellow pages Netherlands, Yellow pages Belgium, Yellow pages Switzerland, Yellow pages Portugal, Yellow pages Austria, UK Dedicated Servers, Web Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, Yellow Pages UK”.

It is a safe bet those are paid links, and their sole purpose is to influence search engines. Now, I would love smarter search engines, but as long as we have the fairly dumb ones we have today, then those links create a bad experience for everyone.

Oh, but it gets worse, I now notice phplist.com has a similar list of links, but these ones aren’t even labeled as sponsored links: “web hosting and reseller hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Yellow Pages Finland, Yellow Pages Germany, Yellow Pages Sweden, Yellow Pages Denmark, Web Hosting UK, Spa Days, Dedicated, Hosting Reseller Hosting, UK Web Hosting, cheap web hosting, Yellow Pages France, Yellow pages Austria, Web Design Company, Cosmetic Surgery, Yellow Pages UK, Yellow Pages Italy, Yellow Pages Norway, Yellow pages Spain, Yellow pages Netherlands, Yellow pages Switzerland, Yellow pages Portugal, Schüssler Salze”.

Spa days and Cosmetic Surgery are cute additions to the list. Now, these are so blatant there is no way that Google and others haven’t already busted them on this.

Way! phplist.com is the top “organic” result for ‘mailing list software‘ and also for ‘php mailing list‘.

Ironically, the other links on the page go through a redirect function http://www.phplist.com/t/~[target url]

Using the way back machine, you can see when the sponsored links where added:

• Sept 1, 2006 No similar links http://web.archive.org/web/20060901081213/http://www.phplist.com/
• Nov 9, 2006 Now 3 links all hosting related. This seems reasonable. They could have a
  genuine partnership and have found those hosts to provide a good
  phplist experience. http://web.archive.org/web/20061109075825/www.phplist.com/
• Aug 17, 2006 Now 6 links including Spa Days and Cosmetic Surgery http://web.archive.org/web/20070817054431/http://www.phplist.com/

Wed, Feb 13th I emailed tincan.co.uk asking about these sponsored links but haven’t heard back.

I’m hoping by posting this publicly it will help shame them into correcting. It is a really shame that it dirties what otherwise looks like an awesome product and contribution to open source.

Hopefully, they correct it before someone reports them to Google and the other search engines for paid links. See Matt Cutt’s How to report paid links for more information, but the following from the article is particularly relevant:

There are a few interesting things about these links. If you take off your webmaster hat and put on a user hat for a minute, you quickly start asking yourself questions like “Why is a Linux site linking to a bunch of poker, pills, and gambling sites?” Users often consider links like this spammy or low-quality. I’m sure some people will happily defend links like these, but in my experience people who search on Google don’t want links like these to affect Google’s search results.