Or, What Josh Said About Ansearch That Was Irrel­e­vant to Most Users.

Dean Jones responded to my Ansearch Answers post with the following:

All in all I feel [the post is] a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the so called facts, but I stand by my recent email… namely that sim­ply review­ing us on tech­ni­cal issues that most peo­ple either

1. wouldn’t have dis­cov­ered, or;
2. would not likely care about,

is sell­ing your audi­ence short.

I’m inclined to dis­agree, and just wanted to quickly post to say that. I like to think I under­stand the ‘audi­ence’ here fairly well. They’re either peo­ple with (web-)geek ten­den­cies, and are hence inter­ested in any analy­sis and crit­i­cism I can deliver on the tech­ni­cal aspects of prod­ucts, etc., or (and this cat­e­gory is com­pletely unre­lated to the for­mer) stu­dents and humanities-focussed peo­ple read­ing var­i­ous con­tent I’ve pub­lished here — rang­ing from stage plots to a short story to an essay on the nature and effects of the dig­i­tal divide.

Most guests in the lat­ter cat­e­gory are just that: guests. They gen­er­ally dis­cover this con­tent via a search engine, read what they want, and leave. Over 80% of my vis­i­tors stick around for one minute or less, pre­sum­ably because they find what they need quickly, or dis­cover that the con­tent isn’t what they were look­ing for.

The “reg­u­lar” audience/participants, how­ever, are not that. I don’t think you’re all geeks, but this blog leans towards that style of con­tent, and you match that accord­ingly. You don’t come here look­ing for prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions (the one excep­tion to that being some­one who viewed my post on Asterisk/VoIP, and asked me what my expe­ri­ences with it had been some time later: to which I replied, we haven’t both­ered, as we moved into a house with a Com­man­der sys­tem pre­in­stalled!). You come here, I think, for the qual­ity of writ­ing, for rants, for occa­sion­ally insight­ful (I hope) com­ment on var­i­ous facets of things I deem interesting.

This is a blog. This is not a news­pa­per, though it is pos­si­ble that search engines, iron­i­cally, are chang­ing the clout of this medium to some­thing sim­i­lar. The dis­tinc­tion between news­pa­per and blog becomes blurred with posts like the one that inspired this, because of the form it was writ­ten in. It is impor­tant, how­ever, to remem­ber the audience.

Peo­ple don’t come here to shop for search engines. We might be inter­ested in how they work, what they do, what the poten­tial ben­e­fits and fail­ings of each one is, but ulti­mately it doesn’t affect anyone’s choice in the real world. Sim­i­larly, investors are unlikely to come here, scop­ing out Ansearch’s offer­ing before buy­ing into par­ent com­pany Optum. And, if they did, my con­clud­ing remarks were pos­i­tive — I gen­uinely believe the story bal­anced out in their favour more than any­thing else. If I over­played the sig­nif­i­cance of a small flaw that could poten­tially be abused, my apolo­gies. I don’t, how­ever, regret includ­ing it in there at all, because I think it’s some­thing my audi­ence is inter­ested in.

As you stated in an ear­lier email… “I’m not 100% sure as to how one should go about review­ing a search engine.” Here’s a tip. like Google, Yahoo, MSN… we are a busi­ness. For us to stay in busi­ness we need to gen­er­ate revenue.

To do this we need to get more peo­ple to our SE, to get them to come back more often, and to, through their usage (CPM, CPC etc…) gen­er­ate revenue.

To achieve this we need to pro­vide a search ser­vice that the user finds use­ful. Given our rapid growth over the past months in UV’s and rev­enue, I would say we are doing OK.

Unfor­tu­nately for Ansearch and any­one else who wants to use this as an adver­tis­ing space, we don’t par­tic­u­larly care if you’re mak­ing money. It’s good to hear they’ve grown: if their evolv­ing prod­uct is any­thing to go by, they deserve it. But met­rics such as rev­enue and Unique Vis­i­tors mean lit­tle to this audi­ence, even if it’s what investors want to find out all about.

I think this is a fair assess­ment of this site’s ‘audi­ence’ (the impor­tant ‘audi­ence’, for me, being the minor­ity that don’t come through search engines, sub­scribe by RSS, and come back regularly) — though, as always, your role is not restricted to that. You are par­tic­i­pants. In light of this, I’d invite com­ment and dis­cus­sion on this post as to your role as you under­stand it. It’s pos­si­ble I’ve got this all wrong… but I doubt it.