Remember way back when Google used to show the number of pages they have indexed on their home page? Remember the war between Yahoo and Google where they competed to get the most pages indexed? It seemed that the operators of the big engines felt that if their index was bigger, they were the better search engine. It was fun to watch at the time, but eventually those numbers quietly disappeared.

However, when the Cuil search engine came out last year, its creators made the bold claim that it was the largest search engine in the world. Its home page, as of this blog post, proclaims its index to be 127 billion pages. Interestingly, just three days before Cuil officially launched on July 28, 2008, Google made the statement that their search engine was aware of one trillion urls, but added that they "don't index every one of those trillion pages." For a moment I wondered whether the number wars were going to start up again. They didn't.

But is it true? Does Cuil index more pages than Google? And why should you care either way?

First, let's see if it's true, then we'll talk about the implications to you as a webmaster.

Here's a simple way to find out: search for a single word term in Cuil and Google and see how many pages comes back in the result counts. For optimal results, the word should be extremely common — likely to appear on just about every single (English) content page indexed by both engines.

For example, the word the. I searched for "the" in Cuil and Google (and, for fun, Yahoo and Bing). Here are the numbers I got back, sorted with the engines having the most results first.

Rather dramatic differences! Based on these results, Cuil does seem to index a lot more pages than Google and the other major search engines (at least pages written in English).

Remember, though: Google made it clear that they don't index every page they are aware of. In fact, assuming that Cuil actually indexes most of the publicly available content on the web, that means that Google is choosing not to index more than 80% of pages which contain the word "the" (which it's safe to say appears on pretty much all content written in English).

What causes Google to filter a page from its index? The previously referenced blog post on Google's blog says that "many [pages] are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content … that isn't very useful to searchers."

Google is notorious for making vague statements that are understood by just about nobody. So what's the real truth? Let's disect their statement a bit and find out.

Google says that pages which are "similar to each other" aren't necessarily indexed. These kinds of statements from Google have really caused a lot of misunderstanding and the dissemination of misinformation by self-proclaimed gurus of search engine optimization, who often claim that your page will get penalized if it's a duplicate of some other page.

We can prove from Google's own results that the engine does, in fact, index duplicate content. How? It's easy: Hop over to EzineArticles.com and grab the title of the most published article in any given category, then search for that title in Google using the "intitle:" operator.

For example, the most published article in the last 60 days in the Finance category right now is titled "Same Day Loans - When You Are Running Out of Options!"

Go to Google and search for this:

intitle:"Same Day Loans - When You Are Running Out of Options!"

Right now 7 results show up. When I click the link at the bottom of the results to show duplicates as well, I get 87 results. That means Google has 87 copies of the same article in its index. Clearly, the fact that the content is the same doesn't prevent Google from adding a page to its index.

Reading Google's own words about duplicate content in their support material gives the impression that when they refer to duplicate content, they're mostly talking about content on the same site. They also state that "duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."

So Google appears to be indicating that similar content is not indexed if it's perceived to be for search engine manipulation.

That may be their goal, but it's not the case in actuality. Content is very often created and syndicated for the purpose of building links that get a page ranked in Google. That practice works very well, too. Perhaps if the duplication is egregious enough… but unless you're doing some large scale duplication and distribution you generally have nothing to worry about.

The second part of Google's statement indicated that a page may not be indexed if it's "auto-generated content … that isn't very useful to searchers." An example they give is a calendar script that would create an infinite number of pages if the search engine crawler kept following all of the links for all of the dates going forward in time. Google was not specifically talking about page content that's generated by software.

Again, we can prove that Google indexes software-generated content by using their own index. I went to Google's shopping page and clicked on one of the "recently found" links (in this case, it was "bicycle trailers"). The first result was from Amazon.com, which has an API that allows people to use Amazon product information on their own sites (e.g., you can create Amazon-like product pages using software).

I searched at Google for two sentences found in the product description (with quotes):

"The Burley Solo trailer is the top of the line when it comes to a single child trailer. With its newly designed reclining seat and full suspension axel your child will be riding in comfort."

That search returned 10 pages, and when I clicked the link for showing filtered results, 46 pages. So obviously Google has no problem indexing that kind of content, either.

So what is it, then, that will prevent Google from indexing a page? The answer is simple, and it's one that you'll probably never hear from Google.

Sometimes I wonder why Google bothers putting up support materials when they never give you a real answer to anything. They want to be vague to prevent people from manipulating the results, but guess what? People manipulate it all the time anyway!

So here it is, the real answer to why Google's index is 80% smaller than Cuil's, and why so many pages go unindexed:

No links = No Indexing

That is, if a page is a duplicate of some other page on some other site, but the page has no links to it, Google will crawl the page — and even put it in their index for a while — but after a few days or weeks the page will usually be removed from their index.

I say "usually", because if the site that the duplicate page appears on has enough links to it overall, then the page will stay indexed even if there aren't any links directly to it. That's why sites like EzineArticles.com, for instance, has 4,690,000 pages in Google's index even though many of those pages don't have any external links to them — the site as a whole has enough links for Google to feel it's worth keeping anything that appears on that site indexed.

That makes sense, right? Why muck up the index with massive amounts of duplicate content that isn't important enough for anybody to link to it?

What all of this means for you as a webmaster is simple: if you're going to distribute articles or other duplicate content in order to build links to your web site and rank better in Google, you need to make sure that the content you distribute is linked to by other external pages. Whether you accomplish that by social bookmarking or writing additional articles on EzineArticles that link to your articles on "lesser" sites or though some other method, you need to be sure that the content is linked to.

So, sure, Cuil's database might be a lot larger than Google's, but that doesn't mean that it's better — Google just does more filtering. That's important for you, because if you want your content to stick around, you need to make sure Google considers it valuable by throwing some links at it.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

As I run queries on the major search engines these days, I'm finding that link-based ranking of pages has a major drawback: the most relevant results often don't make it to the top.

Let's take, for instance, the query "acne home remedies". Run that phrase through Google and you'll get back the results that are the best optimized (that is, that have the most in-bound links related to the query).

As of right now, the #1 ranking result in Google for "acne home remedies" is rather mediocre. You have to click onto a bunch of other pages linked to on that page to get to any real information. It's time consuming and difficult.

For me, the number one result would ideally contain a general summary of information related to the query. That is, "acne home remedies" should show pages that list a number of home remedies for acne on the ranking page — not just links to other pages that talk about those remedies. And the top ranking pages should talk about a number of remedies, not just one. Also, the remedies that are talked about should be well known and referenced on other web pages so that I, the searcher, can have a reasonable amount of trust in the information.

How well-linked a page is should play a part, because those links help establish some authority for the page, but they should not be so strong a factor that the links cause mediocre pages to rank the way they do for a lot queries in Google and Yahoo and Bing these days.

So how do we get search results that use linking to help judge authority, but that contain solid information that is reasonably trustworthy?

That's the goal of my latest search engine, Shablast. The way it works is pretty simple, but very effective (in my opinion):

1. Get the top ranking pages from a major search engine (in this case, Bing).
2. Analyze each result to see what topics are being discussed on the ranking pages.
3. Resort the results, showing the pages that touch on the greatest number of popular topics first.
4. Filter out the obvious spam.

The results I'm seeing from this four step process are pretty good so far, but I need a lot more people to test it out and let me know what they think about it and where it falls short (which, no doubt, this early in the game it does for some queries).

So what I'd like for you to do is hop over to Shablast.com and run some subjects through it that you are familiar with and let me know if the results are good or poor, and why the results are good or poor. Keep in mind that Shablast is designed primarily for informational queries, so don't expect grand results when doing product-based searches.

You can post a comment here, or (preferably) you can go to the Shablast Forum and post a message with the keywords you searched and what was good or bad about the results returned by Shablast. I can then ask you questions (if needed) and refine the algorithm to improve the process.

If this is something you're interested in experimenting with, why not take a moment to hop over to Shablast and give it a go?

Thanks in advance, and please feel free to post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

It's been a little over two years since I created that case study, and I thought you might be interested in knowing how things are going with that little content site. Yes, it's still up and running. Yes, it's still well ranked in Google. Yes, it's still making money. No, I haven't done any additional work to keep it ranked.

As a recap, here's what I did:

1. I did some research and discovered a niche in the fitness market that I felt was ripe for the picking (today I use Niche Horde for that–it's a lot easier).
2. I used my Instant Article Wizard software to create 10 unique articles that would make up the site content.
3. I submitted an additional 10 articles to EzineArticles.com so that each of the inner pages would have a few links to it.
4. I added the site to my 3WayLinks.net network to grow the backlinks to it.

When I setup this site, there were some dissenters. "Oh yeah," they said, "it does well right now, but Almighty Google is going to catch on and deindex the site, just you wait!"

Well, that's dissenters for you. Over two years later, here's my latest AdSense report from that little niche site that sits untouched, happily generating income for me month after month:

If you were around when I did the original case study, then you might recall that my goal for the site was $3 a day, or about $1,000 a year. As you can see from last month's AdSense revenue, the site is doing much better than that. It actually earned over $7 a day — more than twice my original goal.

But was that a fluke? How has the site done overall? Here's the total 26 month report:

Yup, this little 10 page site (which doesn't look very professional, btw, and only took about 5 hours to create) is about to hit the $5,000 earnings mark. That means that the site has earned, on average, $6 a day since I first created it — twice my goal. It also means the site will soon have earned me $1,000 for each hour of work I put into it.

It has required no extra work on my part, with one small exception: I had a 3-day server outage in January of last year that caused the site to drop out of the Google rankings until I installed a blog and threw up some fresh, relevant content for a couple of weeks. That would not ordinarily be required, but since the site disappeared for three days Google wanted some affirmation that it was not dead and gone, and fresh content was the ticket to get the rankings restored.

I just can't emphasize enough how many people threw up contrary opinions, proclaiming how the Google Deity in its all-knowing wisdom and power would discover and neutralize my 3WayLinks.net network. And yet the site still ranks #4 and #5 for its primary and secondary keyword phrases, and has done so consistently for the last two years — and it is not alone, not by a long shot. 3WayLinks is more powerful than ever since I've continually made improvements to the way the network builds and maintains links to your site.

You may not be able to live off of $5,000 in two years, but imagine building 50 or 100 successful sites like this one (certainly possible considering it only took five hours to begin with). Even if you could only spare 10 hours a week, that's two sites a week, or more than 100 sites a year. Even if you could only reach my original $3 per day per site goal, that's $300 a day, which comes to over 100,000 powerful reasons each year to start building content sites and putting them into 3WayLinks.net.

Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.

There's not much new there, which is no surprise, though it's nice to have some hard evidence support the conclusions I've drawn from analyzing Google's search results for the last few years.

I recommend you read the whole post, but here's the gist:

1. Get links from unique domains to your site.
2. Have the keywords in the domain name.
3. Have the keywords in the title.
4. Don't overdo it with the keywords.

Some of the common myths are busted in there too:

1. PageRank is the holy grail (the data shows it isn't).
2. On-page factors matter a lot (except for the page title, no they don't).
3. Subdomains with the keywords help (nope).

However, SEOmoz is failing to discern a major component of why Google's search results look the way they do. They say in their blog post regarding their results that they don't have the whole picture, because it's clear from their data that although getting links to the ranking page shows a real correlation with the page's ranking, it's not the whole story. The page with the most links doesn't always win.

I am floored that they don't know the reason why, despite their obvious technical capability of building such a massive, sophisticated database.

What they are missing is this: they are not taking into account the ranking domain's authority (the number of links to the WHOLE site, not just the ranking page). They were only analyzing the number of links to the ranking page itself.

I bet if they took into account the total number of links coming into the ranking site they would quickly see why the SERPs aren't based solely on the number of links to the ranking page–some of those results have lots of authority despite having few links to the ranking page.

Wikipedia pages, for example, rank primarily because the Wikipedia site has hundreds of millions of links (198 million according to Yahoo! Site Explorer as of right now), which in Google's eyes makes the inner pages trustworthy to rank even though they have few links themselves. This happens with lots of other sites, too (EzineArticles, Amazon, etc.).

I can't believe SEOmoz is even looking at H tags (H1/H2/H3 etc.). H tags have had virtually zero impact for many years.

Let me make it real simple for you. To rank for anything in Google, all you have to do is:

1. Register an exact-match .com/.net/.org domain name
2. Include your keywords in the title tag.
3. Get lots of links from unique domains

and

4. Don't be surprised if Wikipedia still outranks you (unless you can come up with 200 million links yourself).

It's not that complicated. That's obvious to me from years of analyzing Google's search results. And I didn't need a database of hundreds of billions of links to only come to a partially correct conclusion.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

 
After writing my post showing how I got 46 page one rankings in Google in 7 days, I was flooded with requests asking me to release my tool for researching niche keywords to build sites around.

Well, I decided to do something a lot better than that. I've built a web-based system that literally discovers and analyzes niche markets while you sleep! It's incredibly easy to use, and super, super powerful. It uses the exact method that I used to achieve all of those page-one rankings, but it finds the niches much faster than I was able to do so on my own.

Find out how it works by watching the preview video on the home page:

Click here to watch the preview video.

To answer a few questions I'm sure will come up:

1. When will Niche Horde be available?

   Soon. I can't give an exact date, but as soon as the beta testing is over (and I expect it to be over within a week), I'll make the system available to everyone.

2. How much will the service cost?

   I'm considering an annual cost of between $27 and $67 a year. I'm not completely decided yet. What I do know is that it will not be expensive. After all, each user helps grow and improve the system by having the Niche Horde client software installed on their own computer.

3. What are the system requirements for the software I need to install on my computer?

   The software requires a Windows computer (98/ME/XP/Vista) that has the .NET Framework 2.0 installed (most already do). I'm sorry, but it won't run on a Mac.

4. How big is the database of keywords?

   With only a few dozen beta testing users, the database achieved 32,000+ keywords in its first 16 hours of operation. That should give you some idea of how quickly the database will reach into the millions of keywords, with thousands of available niche markets.

5. How does the database grow?

   Niche Horde is continually fed new keywords to analyze and expand by finding related keywords. It's fed new keywords by users, and by other outside sources that continually grow the database. So the database actively grows and expands without any work on the part of its users.

6. How is the competition (SOC) determined?

   The number of competing sites is determined by querying Google for the number of results that 1) have the keywords in the title and 2) have the keywords in links coming into the page. (I've modified the system to only count pages with links matching the keywords as competitors). Those are your only real competition. Sites that only have the keywords in the title or in the body of the page, but have no links into those pages containing the keywords, aren't real competition.

ADDED: Regarding Strength Of Competition (SOC)

I've gotten a lot of feedback from people who don't seem to understand the SOC numbers. Some folks seem to be assuming that if you search Google for, say, "pumpkin seed butter" (with the quotes) and it comes back with 7,780 results that the SOC is 7,780.

Wrong!

That figure is only the number of pages Google has that contains the phrase "pumpkin seed butter" somewhere on the page. That's NOT your competition. Your competition is only the pages of those 7,780 pages that have links coming into them whose anchor text is the keywords "pumpkin seed butter".

To find out how many pages THAT is, search Google for:

allinanchor:"pumpkin seed butter"

Then go to the "Advanced Settings" and set Google to show 100 results per page. Then go to the LAST page of results and look at the "Results X of Y" figures at the top of the page. THAT'S your competition. In the case of my example, "pumpkin seed butter", it's only about 295 pages of the 7,780.

Pages that do not have any links coming into them are not really competing to rank for the phrase. Only pages with links coming into them are the ones you need to concern yourself with. That's what NicheHorde.com's SOC number indicates.

Please post any additional questions or requests you have in a comment below.

How did I do it? Simple:

1. Research low-competition keywords that get between 1,000 and 3,000 searches in Google per month.

You want to target "low hanging fruit" for this method, so look for long-tail keywords that the AdWords Keyword Tool says get between 1k and 3k searches per month.

2. Make sure the top 10 currently ranking sites are mostly inner pages from big sites like Amazon.com or EzineArticles.com etc.

If most of the top 10 pages are inner pages with few links to them, then the pages are being ranked based on the site authority rather than the page itself. That means it's pretty easy to rank for those terms.

3. Register an exact-match .COM, .NET or .ORG domain name.

For instance, if the keywords are "small green widgets", then I register smallgreenwidgets.com or smallgreenwidgets.net or smallgreenwidgets.org. No dashes in the name, and no .info or .biz etc. domain names — only .com, .net and .org. Google gives a nice boost to sites whose domain name exactly matches the search query.

4. Create a small 5 page site around the content of the primary keywords plus 4 related keywords.

Nothing fancy required. Just about 300-500 words of content per page centered around the keywords for each page. I also have a site map, privacy policy and contact us page on each site.

5. The Magic Bullet: Get links to the new site from 1WayLinks.net.

I submit an article to my 1WayLinks.net network and have the article posted on 30-50 blogs in the network. The posts spread slowly, at an average rate of about 5 per day. The article I submit has absolutely nothing to do with the keywords I'm trying to rank the site for. It just has a small "about the author" paragraph that links out to the new domain.

I "spin" the links in the linking paragraph so that 50% of the links use the keywords I want the site to rank for as the link text, and 50% of the links use the domain name itself. Since each post in 1WayLinks.net can have up to 3 links in it, I spin the second and third link so that each of the additional 4 pages gets some links aimed at them as well.

The links from 1WayLinks.net are very powerful, especially since I've made some major improvements to how well (and how fast) each post in the 1WL network gets discovered and indexed by Google. I'm getting a lot of feedback from current users saying their Google rankings are on the rise thanks to these new improvements.

In 7 days of using and repeating this simple, four-step process, I now have 46 sites ranked in the top 10 Google results for their primary keywords. Each day more of the sites I've built come into the top rankings, and the ranking of the other sites continue to improve as more links get spread across the 1WL network and Google includes those links into its ranking algorithm.

Based on the results I'm seeing so far, I'm on track to build an AdSense network that earns at least $5,000 a month starting in October. That's right, in just six weeks I expect to have an additional $5k per month in my AdSense account using this method. Not bad 'eh?

Thanks to this simple method backed by links from 1WayLinks.net, it's possible to build a nice AdSense income fast.

Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.

If you've followed my blog for a while, it's likely you've heard me tout the benefits of focusing on razor-targeted keywords to increase the conversion rate of your web site.

To put it simply: keywords that make clear exactly what the searcher is looking for result in a much larger percentage of people buying something. For example, somebody looking for "dallas term life insurance quote" is probably much more likely to buy than somebody searching for "term life insurance." The first searcher is a buyer, the second is quite possibly just looking for information.

This has certainly been the case with a certain web site of mine that holds the number three spot in Google for the name of the product it ranks for. It doesn't get much traffic, but what it does with the traffic it does get is amazing! In fact, in August the site only received 154 unique visitors, but those 154 visitors resulted in 29 sales totaling $676.08 in affiliate income for me.

Twenty-nine sales from 154 visitors is an 18% conversion rate, which is truly excellent for a two-page affiliate web site. (Incidentally, this is the same site I blogged about a while back in this post, which gives more details about the web site.)

This site enjoys such a high conversion rate because it ranks well for a highly targeted set of keywords — the name of the product. It was super easy to rank for, and achieved it's ranking in only six weeks. How did I rank it so well so fast? Simply by putting the site into my 3WayLinks network.

So the next time you sit down to research what keywords you should try and rank your web site for, don't overlook keywords just because they don't get many searches each month. If the keywords are razor-targeted, you'll get a better ranking faster, and often with a bigger bottom line.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

While I was reading through the 1WayLinks.net forum, I noticed a post by a user to a Warrior Forum thread. If you have time to wade through a very long thread, I encourage you to do so.

If you don't have time to wade through it, let me give you the gist:

A user at the Warrior Forum is earning about $300 a day from 31 AdSense sites. He builds unique content and posts articles to roughly 5 article directories (EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com are two of them). He focuses on product-based keywords (e.g. keywords related to Toaster Machines, Ovens, Washers & Dryers, etc.). He targets only on long-tail keywords (three and four keyword phrases that get a small amount of traffic each month from Google).

In short, he's doing a form of what I did in my niche site case study. Focus on small niches and try to achieve a few dollars a day from the site (incidentally, the little niche site in that case study has now earned over $4,200 in AdSense from my 5 hours of work. It averages over $6 a day — twice my goal.).

The author makes a few very important points that I feel warrant repeating:

1. Don't listen to all of the "expert advice" you get from forums. This guy is breaking many of the "rules" you commonly hear about.

2. Don't wait until you find a perfect proven system to get started building your sites — there is no perfect system. Just build your sites and in time you'll fine-tune your own system. (Along the same lines, don't waste all of your time on forums — spend most of your time focused on your work. There's nothing wrong with participating at forums, but don't let yourself get sidetracked.)

3. Once you have a system, stick with it. The original poster made the mistake of getting himself side tracked for a while, and it slowed down his progress. Once he got back on track things picked up again.

4. It's not hard to rank for long-tail keywords. Just a few links will often get you ranked and keep you ranked for a long time.

5. Everybody fails. If one of your sites just isn't working, move onto another one. I can vouch for this myself. I've built many sites that are ranking fantastically, and others that aren't doing what I'd hoped. Focus on the ones that are working for you — don't spend all your time trying to figure out what went wrong with the ones that aren't working.

6. It's better to have a lot of small niche sites than one big earner. It's a lot harder to maintain your rankings for competitive keywords, and in the end you earn less than you would from building numerous smaller sites that take less work to rank and earn more collectively.

That's the gist of the thread — at least it's what I got out of it. It's a great thread, so if you have the time to read it, read it. But the bottom line is:

Do one thing. Do it well.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

I need your help to fix the search engines.

You see, the big engines suffer from a serious problem: they don't take user opinion into consideration.

That's a huge problem, because no machine can come anywhere close to the judgement that a human can make by reading over a page and deciding whether or not it's a good one.

There have been search engines that have tried in the past to allow users to vote on search results, but they all failed miserably.

The reason they have failed is that they counted every vote as equal: whether the voter was a regular joe searcher or a trusted authority figure or a spammer; whether the query was hugely popular or rarely searched for — all votes were equal.

But that's not how real life works, is it?

In the real world, a person's input on what's good or bad depends on the individual's credibility and track record. If a person has proven in the past that their opinions are valuable and trustworthy, then naturally their opinions hold a lot of weight.

On the other hand, if a person has no proven track record, or worse, a poor one, then their opinions won't hold nearly as much weight.

That's how the real world works, and that's how I believe search engines should work, too.

But since the search engines that tried were plagued by spammers because all votes were considered equal, search engines have stopped allowing users to directly influence the search results.

I think this is a HUGE mistake. I think a search engine's BEST asset are the searchers. No machine can judge quality the way a human can. Machines are too easily fooled.

Humans are not so easily fooled. That's why Google pays a large number of human reviewers to pour over their results and find sites that shouldn't be ranking, but that have managed to weasle their way into the top.

You see — algorithms just don't work without human input.

The Credibility Engine

That's why I've created SearchWinds, a new search engine based on the same credibility engine that I built into my instantly popular social-knowledge site, TopDrop.com.

It was a real no-brainer to base a search engine on the same algorithm I use to let users rank tips at TipDrop.

SearchWinds attempts to mimic the trust that people establish over time in the real world by using the credibility engine.

When a user first creates a voting account, they are assigned a credibility rating of 100 — which is the baseline. That gives them a small measure of influence over the search results as they vote for what they feel should rank better (or worse).

However, if a user decides to suggest a page that they feel should be in the results for a query but isn't, then their credibility begins to be put to the test.

When other users vote for the suggested page, then the suggesting user's credibility rises. If they vote against the suggested page, then the suggesting user's credibility falls.

The greater a user's credibility, the more his or her own vote counts towards the credibility of any search result they vote on, and the higher their future submissions initially rank.

The credibility engine greatly reduces the ability of a user to spam the index with junk submissions, because a spammers submissions will quickly get voted down, removing their pages from the search results and decreasing the spammer's credibility.

As the spammer's credibility plummets, his or her future submissions will initially rank further and further down in the results. It doesn't take long before the spammer realizes that they're wasting a lot of time and getting no return for their efforts.

Powered By Bing

When a query is performed for the first time, the initial results are fetched from Bing.com using their developers' API. Only the first 10 results are used.

Bing also has a user account in the SearchWinds system (the username is, of course, bing). All initial query results are credited to that user account.

SearchWinds users can vote on what Bing says should rank for their queries just like they can vote on any user's submissions. As those pages are voted up and down, the Bing user's credibility rises and falls as well.

I think it will be very interesting to see over time how much users agree with Bing's suggested search results.

Powered By YOU

In order for SearchWinds to work well, it's going to need a lot of people searching and voting. That means you! This is your opportunity to help make search what it should be — a spam-free place where the best stuff comes up first. That's hardly a
description of any of the big search engines to date.

So why not go to SearchWinds.com and setup a free account right now? It only takes a few seconds.

Once you've got an account, you can start using SW as your search engine of choice and vote on the results you feel should (or shouldn't) rank.

The submissions you make all link to your user profile, so getting in EARLY and submitting pages and building your credibility offers a great opportunity to really establish yourself as a trusted source of information.

Here's the link:

http://searchwinds.com/

Together we'll make search great again!

P.S. I've setup a discussion forum for SearchWinds as well. I REALLY want your feedback and input on how to make this new search engine as great as I know it can be.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

It all started with Twitter. I love the idea of microblogging. It's a beautiful thing. Twitter makes it easy to post your thoughts and ideas about just about anything in 140 characters or less. Other folks can follow along and read what you have to say.

That's why I love Twitter, but that's also why I don't like it.

You see, it's a great idea, but unfortunately it often ends up that I'm following all of these folks who are posting about what they had for breakfast, or tweet that they're giving their dog a bath, or other ridiculous stuff that I have absolutely no interest in.

Then there are the spammers. Oh my goodness! 100 tweets in a row advertising trash I'm not interested in.

Even when folks aren't spamming, Twitter seriously lacks focus. From one tweet to the next, the sheer volume of subjects is dizzying — and it's rarely related.

That's why I created TipDrop.com. TipDrop is what I call a "social-knowledge" site. Simply put, it's a very focused form of microblogging site.

At TipDrop, a user creates a "tip sheet" focused on a particular subject. The user who created the tip sheet, and other TipDrop users, can post tips to the tip sheet. The users can also vote for or against the tips on the tip sheet. Since 140 characters really isn't enough for a good tip, your tips can be up to 255 characters long.

It's like Twitter meets Wikipedia meets Digg.

For example, let's say I created tip sheet on How to get people to link to your web page (which I have–that link points to it). You can go to that tip sheet to read all of the tips that I and other users have added to get ideas about how to build links to your site. If you like a tip, you vote it up — if you don't like it, you vote it down.

You see the power here? Instead of random bits of noise and nonsense, TipDrop creates tightly focused pages of practical knowledge. It's social-knowledge.

To make it even better, TipDrop is driven by what I'm calling a "credibility engine." Everything in the system is given a "credibility" score: users, tip sheets and tips. The more users vote for a tip, the higher the credibility of the tip, the tip sheet and the tip-writing user. The more users that vote against the tip, the lower the credibility of those three things.

The best (read: most credible) tips appear on top of the tip sheet. Once a tip falls below a credibility score of 1, it disappears off the list.

The more credibility a user gains, the higher up the list his tips appear when he first writes them. Of course, those tips are then subject to users voting them up or down. Also, the higher a user's credibility, the more power his votes up or down command.

What this does is encourage high-quality tips from users who are trying to establish themselves as experts in their field. Each tip is linked back to its author's own account page, where a timeline of the user's tips appear, as well as a list of the user's tip sheets.

The credibility engine also helps prevent spam and junk from coming into the system. Spammers' tips will quickly get voted down, reducing the credibility of not only the tips, but the spammer's account. That way, when they try to submit more spam, their spammy tips will have virtually no credibility, appear at the bottom of the tip sheet, and after just a vote or two disappear entirely.

Of course, the creator of a tip sheet has the ability to delete tips they feel are inappropriate. So the tip sheet owner maintains control that way as well.

Unlike Twitter, TipDrop also encourages you to have links on your account page. You can have up to 10 links appear on the right sidebar of your account pages. And since all of the tip sheets you create appear with your account profile and links on them, you are rewarded for making your tip sheets popular by having other people visit your links.

On top of that, the site is monetized with AdSense ads. In your user settings you can put your AdSense Publisher ID and have 75% of all ad impressions and clicks from your account pages and tip sheets credited to your own AdSense account. I believe that users should receive a monetary incentive to create great content, and that's just another way I make that happen for TipDrop.com users.

TipDrop is a great way to get your email list to build link-bait lists of information on just about anything. Think about it: create a tip sheet on the best ways to lose 10 lbs, have other users add their own tips, and monetize it from the AdSense ads plus links down the sidebar to weight-loss products you promote! Build your credibility up with enough great tips and you'll soon be an established authority in your niche.

The site is now in beta, and I encourage you to go take 30 seconds to sign up for a free account (that's really all it takes — it's super-fast and easy). Perhaps start by adding your own tips to my tip sheet on how to get people to link to your web page?

Check the Site Links down the right sidebar of the home page for links to the TipDrop blog and forum as well. I'm very interested in hearing your suggestions and thoughts on how to make the system better.

Click here to go to TipDrop.com now.

And be sure to post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.