Bessed, A Different Approach to Human-Powered Search - Using Bessed
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Okay, we’ve looked at the home page and noticed some of its points of interest – be sure to check out the FAQ by the way; it explains the site, with attitude (“Who else will add your stinking Web site based solely on its quality, not on how many other sites link to it or how long your site’s been around? No one, that’s who.”). It’s time to see how well it delivers.
You can actually take two different approaches here. If you click on the site map, you get a list in alphabetical order of the topics it has covered. You can also use the search box if you don’t want to scroll down the list. So what happens when I use the search box for one of my favorite searches, namely “juggling”?
The image is cropped, of course, but you can see clearly what happened. I want to emphasize that I expected this result, and I don’t hold it against the site; remember, Bessed has been around only since October 2006, so it’s bound to have some gaps. Wikipedia has an article on juggling with links leading to other sites. About.com seems to have an area devoted to juggling, but in some ways it’s not as easy to find as some of the other areas (like the one devoted to crochet, for example). But both About.com and Wikipedia have been around much longer than Bessed, so they have had time to build up their readership, their editors, and their active users.
So how is Bessed on the topics it actually covers? Let’s look at the entry for Apple Computer, which must have been one of the earliest ones, judging from the date. This will take more than one image.
Here you see the top sites are pretty legitimate: the company web site, its Wikipedia entry, and a news story. The news story dates to the same date as the blog entry…and while it doesn’t look totally outdated yet, it will if it stays there too much longer. Keeping these entries up to date may become a challenge; fortunately, Bessed is set up to receive feedback from users, so that should hopefully help them to know when certain things are need updating.
Here’s the next part of the page:
Well, now we know at least one of the places Bessed hopes to get their revenue – and again, I can’t find fault with that. The unsponsored links show another news story, and the site for the main conference and expo focused on Apple. These are all appropriate, though the same caveat applies about the news story. At least the news links were still active when I clicked on them.
In all fairness, this is what I got when I simply clicked on an entry from the site map. What would have happened if I’d typed the word “apple” (without quotes, of course) into the search engine? Take a look:
This may not be on target for fruit fanciers, but it’s certainly on target for tech types. Bessed returned 11 results in all, with the only one that made me scratch my head being the last one – Mexico vacations? A click on the link gave me the answer to that one: the blog page’s links include one for a site called “Travel Pod” and another one for “Apple vacations.”
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