Web Marketing Strategy Update

“Chat, flirt, socialize and have fun” is the tagline for the popular social dating site, Badoo. Founder of the site, Andrey Andreev, started Badoo in 2006 when it served only as a photo sharing site. Andrey was living in Spain at the time, and mainly because Spanish girls couldn’t be dated until the male had met her family, he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to launch the site with a “meet new people” concept.

One year later in 2007 Andrey made an about turn on his initial judgment. He decided to test his views on Spanish women, and repositioned the Badoo as a place to meet new people, rather than just a photo sharing site. This decision came after Andrey observed that even though his site was not earning him revenue, the number of users had grown tremendously within the first year of its launch. The 2007 Google Zeitgeist recorded Badoo as one of the fastest growing search terms, second only to iPhone.
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Is the internet is poised to offer humanity the most critical element of an advanced society – absolute competition enveloped in absolute transparency, where every product and service is taken as a market driven result? In a market driven economy, it is the individual that determines who receives the accolade and who is cast to the depths of electronic obscurity.

While we are used to thinking of search engines determining which site ranks well and which doesn’t, that view is only completely true over the short term. In reality, the search engines are acutely listening to how customers feel about the website by looking at the bounce rate. A bounce is a visitor who immediately returns to the engine to perform another search. Engines measure the bounce rate of every visit. If the bounce rate of a site is high to begin with it will be very hard to even get it ranked. So clever web masters have devised ways to keep a customer on the site just long enough so that the bounce rates are managed.
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Not many people are aware that in addition to it’s famous ranking algorithm, Google has been employing an army of manual raters through third-party contractors since 2005. Known as Quality Raters they serve as focus groups to review the quality of Google’s search results and that of the websites which rank well for queried keywords.

One current rater who wishes to remain anonymous stepped forward to share some relevant information and to clear some common misconceptions that may be floating around about their trade.

On talking about the turn of events which led him to become a Google Search Quality Rater, he said he was looking for an alternative source of income at the time as he’d been advised by his employer that he’d have to take a pay cut. He responded to an ad for a Quality Rater on the Internet by submitting his resume and was contacted the following day by the third-party contractor. He says the company assured him they would hire him if he passed all of the required tests.
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Recently, I finally got around to looking at the scripts available for the Firefox plugin, Greasemonkey. I was not expecting what I found.

From the main site:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.

For example, you could:

• Make sure that all URLs displayed in the browser are clickable links
• Improve the usability of a site you frequent

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