When I was unceremoniously cashiered from Netscape's Open Directory Project <
http://dmoz.org/ > just over four years ago, I founded the XODP Yahoo! eGroup
and wrote a guest column for Traffick entitled Life After the Open Directory
Project < http://www.traffick.com/story/06-2000-xodp.asp >. My primary
objective then as now was to provide a free speech forum where interested
parties could discuss the future of open content indexing, and that objective
incidentally involved a certain amount of ODP bashing by the various parties who
felt that they had been done wrong by ODP. But discussing the future of open
content indexing has always been subordinate to my overarching interest in how
the Internet *SHOULD* be indexed. To that end, I recently attended Search
Engine Strategies Summer 2004 Conference and Expo (SES), a trade show for search
engine professionals that was held in San Jose from Monday August 2nd through
Thursday August 5th, 2004. (< http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/ >.)

The show was a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed the food and live music at
the Third Annual Google Dance on Tuesday night and the Yahoo! Reception at the
Tech Museum of Innovation on Wednesday night, the latter event noticeably
missing any form of music, a shortcoming that was more than compensated by the
interactive museum exhibits at the reception location. But when it comes to
Internet indexing and search solutions, I can honestly say that there's nothing
new under the sun, and that mercenary concerns about marketing and promoting Web
sites of dubious quality tend to drown out concerns about how to make high
quality Web sites readily available to the masses.

Notwithstanding the pervasive cynical overtones of search engine optimization,
SES has clearly taken its place as the premiere venue for people who want to
learn more about Internet indexing and search solutions. It is also *THE* place
to be for anyone who is part of the Internet marketing industry, providing a
plethora of networking opportunities as well as opportunities to put questions
to the actual decisionmakers at companies like Google, Yahoo! and Overture, and
get straight answers. I had the opportunity to meet and greet quite a few of
these people, whom I once knew only by reputation.

Most memorable among the meets and greets were Richard Skrenta and Chris Tolles,
the founders of ODP. They were at SES hawking their newest endeavor Topix.net
(< http://www.topix.net/ >), and enough water had passed underneath the bridge
for us to engage in some friendly banter and compare notes about the various
events that have transpired since my departure from ODP. Both Skrenta and
Tolles knew that they knew me, but they didn't remember who I was, at least not
at first. Then Skrenta typed my name into his search engine, and jokingly
announced to Tolles, et al., with a sense of alarm, "David Prenatt, . . . David
Prenatt, . . . Botany Bay! Botany Bay!" (For those of you who are not Star
Trek fans, the reference to Botany Bay will be too obscure for me to explain
within the context of this post; just ask a trekkie what it means.)

While I don't pretend to speak for Skrenta, one of the things that I think he
and I found common ground on was the fact that ODP's relevance declined after
the advent of "organic" search engine algorithms like Google (<
http://www.google.com/ >) and pay per click search engines like Overture (<
http://www.overture.com/ >). Until very recently, I think that the one-two
punch of Google and Overture provided a more or less adequate and comprehensive
indexing and search solution for most people, a solution that many people
thought would last for decades to come. I think this explains why Skrenta and
company's newest indexing endeavor focuses on exploiting search engine
technology rather than exploiting volunteer labor. But over the last year, I've
seen compelling evidence that Google reached its zenith in efficiency during the
last year or so after indexing some 4 billion URLs. To wit, Google has
allegedly fallen victim to its own Y2K+3 bug as well as falling victim to the
shameless self-promoters who know how to game the Google algorithm. (_See_ <
http://www.google-watch.org/broken.html > "Is Google Broken?"; _see also_ <
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=141138 > "How to beat Google –
a proven case study.") Meanwhile, Overture has stagnated into a rather limited
search facility that favors only the shrewdest of businesspeople.

To be clear, I think that the search engine industry is an attractive nuisance
for shameless self-promoters, a sentiment that was reinforced by attending SES.
But given my druthers, I prefer a shameless self-promoter who knows that he or
she is a shameless self-promoter to someone who thinks that he or she is above
all that. Somewhere in the middle are the people I generally choose to work
with: Attorneys who are recognized experts in their areas of practice whom I
advise on how to showcase their expertise on the Internet without inadvertently
offending the sensibilities of their potential clients. As far as I am
concerned, the first and most important step in that process is creating a high
quality Web site.

As many of my online hecklers know, I am an attorney by training, but I do not
practice law, a choice that is self-imposed by virtue of the important role that
I feel I can play as a rainmaker for other high profile attorneys. The
correctness of this choice has been reinforced by many of my clients who have
candidly admitted that the practice of law is akin to trench warfare. As such,
even the most ethical attorneys are part of the problems that they hope to solve
by virtue of the fact that they routinely validate an inherently flawed legal
system by achieving Pyrrhic victories for their clients.

I think the same thing can be said about ethical SEO professionals. So, in the
final analysis, I am a mercenary with a sense of ethics, which is quite a
paradox to some people who would like to exploit me to satisfy their own greed.
To wit, "Why not just work for the highest bidder?" Well, as far as I am
concerned, once I have enough money to provide for my basic human needs and the
small handful of luxuries that make my life comfortable and enjoyable, money is
just a way of keeping score. Much more important to me is the triumph of
ideals.

If there is one thing that is noticeably missing in the search engine industry,
it is ideals that are informed by deep reflection. Google, the undisputed
leader in the search engine industry, pays lip service to the ideal that one can
"make money without doing evil." But as Google gets closer and closer to the
reality of an IPO, it seems more and more self-evident that this purported ideal
is actually a sound byte(sic) meant for public consumption, and that the bottom
line for the powers that be at Google is a financial bottom line.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think there's anything immoral about making a
profit. But I do think that there's something inherently wrong with professing
high and mighty ideals while concomitantly exploiting the people who render
faithful service to your business enterprise in the hopes of working their way
up through the ranks. With some very noteworthy exceptions, this is the essence
of Corporate America, where labor and management have always had an adversarial
relationship. It is also the prevailing culture at most large law firms, where
associates are recruited with the promise of someday becoming partners,
exploited for a couple of years worth of billable hours, and then cashiered
without any sort of meaningful legal experience.

By virtue of my distaste for Corporate America and the large law firm mentality,
the vast majority of my consulting clients are sole practitioners and small law
firms. In those rare instances where I've worked with large law firms and large
business enterprises, it has been with very clear boundaries regarding the
nature of my work, not unlike the boundaries that John Galt imposed upon himself
in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. To wit, "My brains are not for sale."
Perhaps if more people were to impose these sorts of boundaries on themselves
and think only for themselves, the Internet (and the world) would be a much
better place.

In theory, Google works on the principle that the most popular Web sites are the
most authoritative. And if people were more interested in giving credit where
credit is due and less interested in boosting their own link popularity, this
principle would probably work quite well. In reality, however, it is very easy
for unscrupulous SEO experts to game the Google algorithm and boost the
PageRank(TM) of mediocre sites, a growing problem of "garbage in; garbage out"
that has defied all of Google's attempts to police it, as noted above. The
solution to this problem is one that requires people to think and act as
individuals. (See generally < http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~maxim/OpenGRiD/ >
"TheOpen Grid.") To wit, rather than join forces with a collective like ODP,
individuals should create and publish their own annotated link lists and license
those link lists to other individuals with a free/open content license. Then,
and only then, would an algorithm like Google be able to harvest meaningful data
from a database of trusted URLs. IMHO, this is the "Future of Search."

Humbly Yours,

XODP Moderator netesq