There's really no need for the comparisons. Both versions are terrible, who cares which is worse. How we go about fixing it should be the topic of discussion.
I've done this once, in one of the tanks with a latch described. It's interesting, sure, but its also really uncomfortable in there. The air is super humid and thick, it's almost difficult to breathe. I'm not ever claustrophobic, but I had fleeting nervous thoughts of being stuck in there. Overall I'm happy I did it once, but I don't think I'm willing to pay the price to do that to myself very often.
What difference does it make if the cause is entirely man made or not. Should we let 80% of worlds population who live on the coast just deal with rising sea levels, because it natural? Do you really need to know it's causing a rise in temperature to want less trucks and cars polluting the air in your city? Or does the fact that we will never have the historic data to know for sure if humans are causing global warming, make it okay to ignore the issue entirely, forever?
>What difference does it make if the cause is entirely man made or not.
If it's not entirely man made, it would mean that efforts to curtail emissions (and consequently economic output) would be pointless and unnecessary.
>Should we let 80% of worlds population who live on the coast just deal with rising sea levels, because it natural?
It's not like the sea will simply rise several meters overnight, if it does actually rise. And again, if it's natural, then wouldn't that mean that we must, in fact, "deal with it"?
>Do you really need to know it's causing a rise in temperature to want less trucks and cars polluting the air in your city?
The air pollution you are concerned about here is sulfur, particulates, and other things unrelated to the CO2 debated over by politicians currently.
>Or does the fact that we will never have the historic data to know for sure if humans are causing global warming, make it okay to ignore the issue entirely, forever?
It certainly moves one's focus of concern to more pressing environmental and social issues.
I agree that I want humans to stop fucking up the earth and I want less pollution. But those feelings do not prove climate change exists. Science doesn't work this way.
I'd like to see how the general population changed in the same time, then maybe a revision of this graph keeping it in perspective of how the rest of the population changed.
> Conclusions:
> Average weight has increased dramatically in the last 40 years with the greatest increases seen in adults. Mean BMI has also increased. Although height has also increased this increase has been much more modest.
Mr. Cringely might start helping his sister by removing the completely unrelated link to his sister's site from his own, or at least mark it "nofollow".
It's really interesting reading the rantings of the grossly misinformed, especially when they are able to dismiss the entire industry of search engine optimization as "bullshit". I bet if the tone of his article was different, he would have dozens of SEOs willing to diagnose the problem and giving tips on how to fix the issues. Oh well, maybe he should get in tighter with Eric Schmidt, so he can personally take a look at the writer's wife's photo pillow website.
based on how misinformed the author was in general on the subject, I think its more likely the site dropped off the first few pages of results. Since it still came up when you search for the domain, it can't be deindexed.
Again, apologies for the imprecision. But you'd agree that it has been delisted for search terms it used to do well for?
Additionally, far less than <1% of the people who use Google get past the second page of results. Getting your ranking penalized by twenty spots is a death sentence.
I'd contend you're the one talking out of their ass.
Relying on another company for all your business isn't a sound business strategy. The person in the article put all their eggs in one basket and this is the result.
This is trivializing to the point of absurdity. When it comes to doing business on the Internet in the English-speaking world, Google is the basket. It's the only basket. I wish it weren't, but it is.
And so, yes, pretty much everyone is reliant on them to be good stewards of the power they possess. (Whether they are or not is orthogonal to that the quilter in question has a pretty good reason to feel like they aren't.)
Except that now everyone goes to Google. It's not just a search engine, it's literally the starting point for the overwhelming majority of web traffic.
In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies.
How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?
Many of those channels rely on guiding people to search engines, or at the very least being findable on search engines by name. To take this example, your website is called portrait quilts, the url is http://portraitquilts.com/ - so you do loads of advertising on twitter, print media, word of mouth etc, and people try to find your site. You can try to guide them to a unique url, but often people won't remember urls, but names, and are encouraged to use this method by the blurring of urls and keyword searches in browsers.
So they open up their browser, type portrait quilts in the address bar, which redirects to a search, and your website is on page 8 despite being an exact match on the search. Game Over.
Seems your other channels are not quite as effective as you thought if google decides to penalise or blacklist your site. If you're off page 1 or 2 you may as well not exist. Of course from Google's point of view, you'll just have to advertise with google, so this doesn't penalise them at all, in fact they are rewarded monetarily for arbitrarily shifting rankings periodically (not that I'm suggesting that they go out of their way to do this, just that the perverse incentive is there).
One free thing you can do to optimize marketing is to not name your business a generic term. If your business has a unique name you generally don't have to worry about competitors outranking you for the name. For example, I don't think my brother will ever get outranked for "porcelain rocket"; he currently owns not just the top spot but the entire first page.
Plenty of products/services like Windows, Xerox, tipex start as generic terms or become them during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they should therefore always come first, but it's instructive if you compare xerox to this website - they dominate the entire first page of google results. What should come first is what would be useful for end users, and I think it's fair to expect a company named after and with an url of a phrase to come at least once on that first page, if lots of people link to them (as from other search engine results they appear to). If that's not the case, Google should be transparent about why these penalties are applied. I understand why they don't want to be transparent for commercial reasons and to stop people gaming the system, but think given their monopoly position it behoves them to be so. Otherwise they can destroy businesses maliciously or, even worse, with complete indifference.
Personally I find Google is providing results which are less and less useful, with their recent emphasis on monetising search, indifference to fairness, and lack of transparency as to their ranking methods - it certainly seems as if in this case a draconian penalty has been applied, and there is no effective way to appeal or even find out what the judgement against them was (webmasters very often is not helpful). A penalty of a few places would be completely understandable if they don't like this site for whatever reason, a penalty of 8 pages while other spammy results dominate search terms is not.
I've switched to DuckDuckGo for now and it's pretty good. Compare the results for Tipex (a popular brand of correction fluid in Europe) for example:
