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Here’s a little story for all my tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist friends out there who have reason not to trust Google. (In the interests of full disclosure, I do not trust Google for a variety of reasons (which is an entirely separate blog post). That being said, my opinion is admittedly biased with respect to Google.

But recently, I’ve been tracking a very suspicious phishing campaign (of sorts) that appears to be an attempt to ferret out paid link buyers. I know it might sound a little crazy, and I may just be totally nuts (wouldn’t be the first time I was accused of that) but hear me out on this one.

I recently received several spam emails from several, self-proclaimed “SEO Marketers” looking to sell text links and blog post reviews. The first one that I received appeared totally innocuous:

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Digg “shouting”, the act of sharing a link between Digg users, built the foundation of gaining Diggs. Once upon a time, the powerful Diggers with massive networks had a great deal of influence on submission popularity. A few even reached somewhat of a celebrity status. For those who managed to reach the “uber” pathetic levels of internet nerdom, their submissions were almost guaranteed to make the front page. Fifteen minutes of anonymous cyber-fame had never felt so good.

However, recently Digg changed their algorithm to make the sweatpants-clad super Diggers less powerful.

Votes from Digg friends were no longer worth as much as before. Now Kevin Rose’s submissions don’t pimp the system. The multitude of his diggs, garnered moslty from the sheer volume of man-crushes alone, will not rank as heavy as before.

I initially expected that incoming shouts would lighten up. I thought users would realize the changes and try a different method of gaining popularity. But to my amazement, shouts became even more aggressive, as people became more desperate to earn Diggs.

I have a good deal of “friends” online. Some I added because I know them personally. Some were because I was interested in their Diggs. And some I added just to get a diverse portfolio, hoping my submissions would be propagated through the system. But because of the algorithm change, people just don’t seem to be using DIGG shouting correctly.

Several years back, Yahoo! released a product called Yahoo! Mindset which dealt with the challenge of differing mindsets that users might have for the same search query. Yahoo! Mindset would essentially reorder the search results with a machine learning system that was based on the user’s mindset or orientation. The tool was fairly simple and intuitive to understand, utilizing a sliding bar that categorized the user’s search mindset as a “shopping” mindset or a “research” mindset. Sliding the bar all the way to the left for “shopping” would produce a search results page for that keyword that was oriented predominantly for those who might be shopping for products/services for that particular keyword. Sliding the bar all the way to the right for “research” for the same search query would produce a different set of results that were predominantly “research” or informational-oriented results for the same keyword query and topic in question.

Now, I just loved this tool. Reordering the search results based on varying mindsets and even varying degrees of different mindsets worked perfectly for me. But Yahoo! Mindset has since gone underground and the website is currently unavailable. (That’s why I didn’t link back to it because the link to Yahoo! Mindset is currently offline.)

Now, some people might think that this is way too much to ask of a common user doing a search, which may be true. But being able to reorder search results based on mindset is so critically important for a number of different reasons… Continue Reading »