Top stories:
Nokia Adds Microsoft Live Search
Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine Utopianism
BusinessWeek Cover Story and Investigation on Click Fraud
Over 30 Domain Names Transferred to Google Inc.
FORBES: 400 Richest American$ , Their Details
New AOL Search Beta Test Available
Save the Forbes story (what is it with lists of rich guys?), I’ve been really pleased with the quality of the stories sumitted to SearchMob. What I wish I had was more voting from readers – in general, the voting has been pretty anemic – 4-6 votes for top stories, usually. I’m not looking for Digg numbers (1000 diggs is not unusual), but my logs tell me there are thousands of readers each day at Searchblog. So…is SearchMob working, or not?
I’ve been a subscriber to your site for a long time (RSS), and I think you do a great job of covering search, but I don’t think that I personally will ever get involved with SearchMob, even to vote.
I have lots of sites that I subscribe to for niche news (like yours), and I don’t have time to be participatory in any of them. I mean no offense to you, of course. I did actually take the time to write this comment. 🙂
Search Engines WEB has many brilliant ideas to maximize the usage and participation in this intitiative.
However, it would be important to mutually profit from this endeavor
I’m somewhat confused by the voting both in terms of low numbers but also because the articles with many votes usually show only 2 or 3 names under the discussion list.
Without trying to be too provocative here I’ve wondered if the articles with high votes are simply folks who are voting for their own articles – or asking others to vote – from different machines. In this environment it’s easy to spoof interest and attain the top spot.
Based on limited data I’m now thinking that most of the people come here for John Battelle insights (ie the JB filter) and simply getting articles by other users (ie the JB Search community filter) is not stirring much interest.
Therefore instead of Searchmob, John, you need to become a Search Cult leader and hole up in a heavily armed Palo Alto Coffee Shop with your search apostles while the FBI files motions to get YOUR database of intentions.
Make it easier! (Yes it’s easy to vote). Make it easier to submit – how about no login required?
I think Search Mob is pretty cool and could use a stand-alone interface. Keep headlines at your blog, but also have a separate domain for it.
It could use more lebensraum. The SearchBlog decoration limits it’s read-ability, I think. Get Philipp Lenssen to do one of his patented interface audits. He’d remove all the distracting stuff on the sides, I think.
Currently, the submit link is hard to find.
Also, the registration process req’d to do a story submit was a enough of an obstacle for me… (yes, call me lazy – but I just don’t want to register.)
One more suggestion. Make it easy for another blogger to put the headlines on their blog. And let people vote from other places.
I’ve been reading your blog for a long time and in response to your note above, I registered and tried to “vote” on some articles. I was logged in and clicked “vote” by a couple of articles but, nothing appears to happen. Do you have to post a comment to vote or just click it? Perhaps you are getting more votes than you think but it’s not working properly? Are there certain browser settings that need to be configured that may be interfering? (e.g., javascript, etc?). I’ll gladly vote it you can help me figure out what I’m missing 🙂 Dan
I had 3-4 friends that I sent the link to when we made “most searched” last week tell me that they clicked on vote and nothing happened.
Just to let you know.
Small bump in the road…what you’re building is great.
I’ve been submitting and seeing votes, but I’ve seen a greater amount of traffic coming through to what I’ve been writing about.
Is it working – they may not be voting, but they sure are reading – so I’d have to say Yes! 🙂
Thanks for building this, it helps get the news out to a more targeted and highly relevant audience that I’m trying to converse with!