AfterVote Marries Meta Search to Customization - Tricking AfterVote and Final Thoughts
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As to technical ways of tricking a search engine, I have to bow to David Naylor. In his review of AfterVote he noted that “Their system seems quite resilient to manipulation but not impervious.” He succeeded in bumping a domain to the number one slot for a low-competition keyword and even moved a spam site significantly higher for “buy viagra uk.” He actually did a little coding for this – six lines of Python, but that’s still more than I could have managed.
Interestingly, once Naylor managed to move the spam site, AfterVote’s countermeasures apparently kicked in. They specifically state that they have “several systems in place to monitor for bots and exploits.” Naylor remained unconvinced that the social aspect itself would help keep spam out of the results; AfterVote argues that users will bury spam if they don’t find the results they need. Naylor, on the other hand, notes that “there’s pretty much always going to be more incentive for spammers to vote sites up than for users to vote sites down.” True enough, but a spammer has to consider it worth the effort to mess with that particular search engine; newer search engines like AfterVote are probably protected, at least temporarily, by their obscurity and Google’s dominance.
I have heard some vague rumors that AfterVote is going to expand its features even more by creating user accounts and permitting users to check their search histories. They will have to be careful as to how they add these new capabilities, however; the search engine was originally named “younanimous” because, by its very nature, it enabled users to search the major engines anonymously. It will want to keep the part of its audience that cares about privacy online; that said, I can certainly see advantages to users having their own accounts, especially if AfterVote expects the social aspects to come into play and add significant value.
It’s the social and customization aspects that might save AfterVote. The University of California Berkeley has a tutorial on meta search engines that recommends against using them. It explains that meta search engines are never better than the quality of the databases from which they pull their results and suggests that users search each engine individually instead.
With the social aspects, however, AfterVote may create a whole that is somewhat better than the sum of its parts. Throw in the ease of use for all those widgets/icons, and you have a fledgling multipurpose tool with some real growth potential. It will be interesting to see whether they can continue to bring the social and customization factors into play while maintaining an easy to use interface.
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