Subject: RE: [hackers-il] The "Joel on Software" site as a Google Bomb

From: Omer Musaev <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 10:19:43 +0300

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shlomi Fish [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2003 1:54 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: [hackers-il] The "Joel on Software" site as a Google Bomb
> 
> On Sat, 5 Apr 2003, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Apr 04, 2003, Shlomi Fish wrote about "[hackers-il] The "Joel on
> Software" site as a Google Bomb":
> > > And since many of the pages have a high PageRank, it eventually, made
> > > FogBUGZ very high too.
> > >
> > > You could say it is a direct (albeit perfectly honest and perhaps
> > > innocent) Google poisoning.
> >
> > Why is that "poisoning"? In fact, it's exactly what Google meant to do,
> > and what people expect of it!
> >
> > Assuming many people respect that Joel's site and link to it, it is safe
> > to say this site has a high reputation. When a site with high reputation
> > links to something, it is pretty safe to assume this is a *good* link,
> > because, if that site routinely linked to crappy sites, it will loose
> > its reputation! This is the idea behind Google, it's not some sort of an
> > unfortunate side-effect.
> >
> 
> The problem is that Spolsky placed links to FogBugz on all of the page of
> his site, some of them may be considered as distinct entities by Google,
> each with its own page rank. Now, since many such pages are linked to from
> many places that refer to them (mailing lists posts, etc.), then as a
> whole it creates an undesirable effect of over-page-ranking FogBUGZ.

I second that. The way the links to FogBugz are pushed into standard footer
of Joel's pages it looks more like banners than like "links page."

BTW, to find out what links Google used to count the rating of the page, you
can use the "link:" API:

		link:http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ/

This will acitvate a search within the pages that contain a link to the
page. Cool.

[ snip ]
 
> I think that "bugzilla" has practically become a synonym for a bug
> tracking
> system, due to the popularity and importance of the Bugzilla-based ones.
> (it is used by Mozilla and related projects, KDE, GNOME/Gtk and many
> others). And it's true that it does not seem to be very high on a search
> for "bug tracker" or "bug tracking". At least not the deployable product
> itself.

I think that "bugzilla" hasn't become a synonym, but a brand name within an
open-source developers. In Mercury, for example, it isn't bugzilla that
represents all bugtracking software, but "Test Director" - a Mercury
product.

Thus, I think that you're right wrt open-source developers, but wrong wrt
mainstream commercial software. Thus, a company looking for a bugtracking
software and not aware of bugzilla will more probably find FogBUGZ and not
bugzilla. 

Thus, if FogBugz will "overrank" bugzilla overall, Joel will succeed in
using the Google effect for a marketing campaign with extreme
performance/price ratio. 

> Regards,
> 	Shlomi Fish

--
Omer Mussaev
Software Engineer, EMS team, APM R&D
Mercury Interactive

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Mercury Interactive Corporation
Optimizing Business Processes tom Maximize Business Results 

http://www.merc-int.com
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---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 12:58:24 +0300 (IDT)

> This will acitvate a search within the pages that contain a link to the

Interesting, it contains a lot of "junk", the vast majority of it from
Joel's site. Lots of translations and translated articles. Wonderous are
the ways of Google's Page Rank system.

> represents all bugtracking software, but "Test Director" - a Mercury

Chen told me about it. She said she tried FogBUGZ and that Mercury's
product was much better. She said about its ability to write triggers
using VBA, which sounds very cool and somewhat useful if you are a
serious developer. BTW, I could not find anything too relevant for it in
dmoz.org or the Google Directory.

I now noticed that the Google Directory has been updated to reflect my
changes to the Solitaire category. It's about time it was updated, because
it's been very out of date. Google Dir is a mirror of dmoz.

> software and not aware of bugzilla will more probably find FogBUGZ and not

Probably.

> using the Google effect for a marketing campaign with extreme

Ack.

I seriously doubt that FogBUGZ or any other commercial software poses a
threat to Bugzilla or whatever open-source product will supercede it as
the next bug tracker. It is true that at the moment, the software market
at large is dominated by commercial solutions (Windows and other Microsoft
products, etc.) and not by open-source ones, except perhaps for Apache,
and other such Internet servers.

An open-source software of good quality and good management, however, is
something that usually can't be threatened by a commercial software, at least
not in the Linux and UNIX worlds. Even Windows, while being more
successful than Linux at present, is not a threat to it, because the
existing user-base will not completely switch to Windows, and more new
happy users are gradually added. I'm not talking about Legal threats just
competitive ones. (Legallobable is a different issue altogether)

In regard to FogBugz, many executives who are looking for a good bug
tracking solution will be appaled either by the fact that it runs on IIS,
or by the fact that it is written in VBScript. (the first due to security
and reliability and the second due to the fact that it's hard to take it
seriously this way). So we can expect people who are looking for a UNIX or
Linux solution to choose something else entirely, bugzilla or otherwise.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

My opinions may seem crazy, but they all make sense. Insane sense, but
sense nonetheless.