10 Reasons Digg Could be the New Google, and Suggested Improvements
Online marketing information can change quickly This article is 14 years and 28 days old, and the facts and opinions contained in it may be out of date.
Despite being incredibly sick of always hearing about “the new google”, and not believing it can happen due to the extremely high barrier to entry, I think there *IS* still opportunity for someone to gain significant share of the stagnating search marketplace. The ONE major reason it could happen – is geek mindshare. That’s where search was won by G. I read Rand and Matt’s excellent piece of the digg algorithm, and it got me thinking about why I like the site so well. If the same processes, and level of expertise can migrate to other genres – they have a winner.
- Simple, TRANSPARENT – yet effective algorithm
Kevin Rose an Owen Byrne won’t sell out to Google (well – for less than a billion)
They just need an index – Y and G have both taught us it’s about quality and not quantity
They have the mindshare from early adopters
Effective, scalable spam solutions (community moderation)
It’s not hard to add topical categories
About 10,000 beta users away from creating the best index ever.
Strong ontology + decentralized user based quality control + (even a decent) index of pages + advanced search tools = kick ass search engine.
Digg *is* webmaster central
Relevance *is* the goal – and not a conflicting interest.
14 Tips to Kevin and Owen to Make Digg Better (go get ‘em!)-
- Improve your advanced search functionality
Develop a payment revenue share model for users
Weight users votes with topical expertise
DON’T Alienate your users – solicit feedback – and COMMUNICATE with top users – a forum (public or private) would probably be effective. RETAIN the goodwill you have – don’t abuse it
Attract more celebrities and mainstream mindshare
Build an index (even if it’s beta on a subdomain)
If you can’t build an index – rent (borrow) one and lay your algo on it until you can.
Get some funding and build the infrastructure (it’s still too damn slooooow)
Develop a better ad model to pay for those better beefier machines
Hire the equivalent of netscape anchors – but use a more creative pay model than starving wages for full time work.
Get Leo Laporte on board – that guy rocks.
Don’t be afraid of beta stuff on subdomains (look at Google!)
Get your blog off blogspot – and never do anything like that again unless it’s for reputation management or link pop
Hire Oilman and Greg for search advice
Anybody else got reasons Digg will or will not be the next 800lb. gorilla? Suggestions for improvement?

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