A couple of years ago someone suggested we should see google as a black box. We don’t have access to the inner part of google, but we can feed it input and examine the output. I still think that is a valid way of looking at it, and far more people should experimenting and reporting the results instead of guesstelling what they think will be the result.

If we go further back, to 1994, there was this movie with the now famous quote “Google is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get.” I believe it was about a google employee who changed his algorithm every few months or so. I don’t remember it exactly, but I do remember the quote. Google is like a box of chocolates.

I really think that this still holds today. If you get a box of chocolates with forms you have never seen before, you don’t know what you will get when you put them into your mouth. I like praliné, so I always hope that’s what I will pick. I absolutely hate any with liquir in it, so I try to avoid them if I can. But how can I know? You never know what you gonna get!

Sometimes there are hints. My great secret discovery is that the ones wrapped in paper are often the ones with liquid in it. And often the ones with white chocolate on the outside have a very soft taste one the inside. And that’s true for google too. If you feed an empty page in it, don’t expect to get number one for a given search phrase. But what about the other chocolates in the box? Well, they are a surprise. There’s only one thing you can do, and that’s try them.

I don’t believe that’s the end of the story though. When the google employee in the movie said “a box of chocolates”, he didn’t just mean that every time you get another completely different box. You just get the same chocolates every time for about several months. The ones you eat every day, the ones whose forms and colors tell you what’s inside them. And after those months some things may have changed. But if you aren’t doing anything weird and following the webmaster guidelines, whatever is inside your favourite chocolate should taste more or less the same. Every few months google may put a new chocolate in the box, but you still know which one to grab and which one to avoid, right?

So for me, google is a box of chocolates. I didn’t know what I would get first time, but I do know. And I like to taste the new chocolate in the box. I never know what I’m gonna get.

I bought an iDREAM bluetooth device some days ago. Something that you plug into your USB port and *POOF* you have bluetooth capabilities on your computer (which I didn’t have). I don’t know what the correct name is for that. Anyway, here is a screenshot of a similar product since I didn’t find any of mine.

It is wrapped in plastic with cardboard inside it. The way to open it is to cut through the plastic and get the thing out. So I took a pair of scissors and started cutting. Damn, that was tougher than I thought; I didn’t manage to get through it. So I looked more closely at the cut already made and saw that there was a small CD inside it: I had been cutting through this CD! WTF? Nowhere could I see that hidden inside the cardboard there was a CD. Why do they make this invisible?

Now I have to say I was very lucky. I only cut the side of the CD, but I could see that it had been written only in the middle. Fortunately I didn’t cut too far and I still can use the CD. It isn’t flat anymore though, but it works. Next time I’ll cut right next to the edges instead of going for the smallest cut possible to get the thing out.

You have created your first website, put some pages on it, and are waiting for google to come crawling. Soon you will be indexed pretty good and the visitors will come by the dozens. At least that’s the schedule you had planned. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen. Your main index page gets a visit now and then, but google leaves your other pages uncrawled. What is happening? Google doesn’t like your new and informative site?

Let’s take a look at a summary of a session of Search Engine Strategies that was held in 2006 in New York. In an answer to one of the questions, Matt Cuts (representing google), seems to have answered something along the following lines:

Your site may not have enough PageRank for us to do a deep crawl.

Now that’s interesting. Many of us already knew about this one, but it is always nice to have this from the “mouth of google” itself. Let’s rephrase that statement: if your site doesn’t have high enough points for google, not all pages will get indexed. With high enough points, I mean PageRank (PR) of course.

That’s hard to swallow for any beginning webmaster. If you are lucky enough to avoid the sandbox, you still face another problem: nearly non-existence. You did a hard job on creating some pages that you think others might find useful, and now google tells you it doesn’t care about them. And how can you make google care? By having enough others link to them. But how are those others going to find your pages and find them useful enough to link to, if they can’t be find through google? Guess the url that might be interesting for their search phrase?

The problem we have here does seem to have some resemblance to the problem of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It doesn’t actually mean the poor are getting poorer, but that the distance between the rich and the poor is getting bigger and bigger. And that is what seems to be happening for the smaller guy on the web. While the big are getting bigger because they have enough PR and therefore google crawls their pages almost before they are written, the small guy faces the hard task to get off the ground. It’s far from impossible. That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that for a well established site it is a lot easier to get the content indexed and found by people. This leads to an increasing change to get links back, and therefore even getting better points. So the gap between big sites and small sites becomes larger and larger.

To get out of this circle you have to become a good marketer, or write truly great content. Then, eventually, you will be noticed and a similar (though initially much smaller) spiral will happen to your site. But for most of the people out there it won’t happen. That’s the nature of the web google is currently endorsing.

1. price

There are many that don’t care about the open-source philosophy, but still support it for this reason. So I’ll start with it though I believe it’s not the most important one. Most open-source software is free. Take a look at OpenOffice.org for example. A great office suit, and it won’t cost you a dime.Or linux: a great alternative to Microsoft Windows. True, people can ask money for their linux version. And if I download a version of the internet, burn it on a CD and install it on someone’s computer, I could ask some money for the costs of the CD and the time I spent installing it or the support I give. But still, you could download and install it yourself for free. That’s like free beer you’re getting here.

2. scalability

This will be important especially for enterprises. If you can cut on the cost, and even get the software for free, there is nothing that prevents you from multiplying everything as far as you see fit. No more additional license costs because the software you just bought only allows you to use one copy on one machine. From now on, you can use as many copies as you like on all the places you like. If your company is growing you don’t need to fear those extra license costs any more. If you dream about extending the installation of the software to another department: open-source makes your dream come true without budget nightmares.

3. security

A hot topic. Take the Firefox versus Internet Explorer debate. That’s open-source versus closed-source. Now tell me, which of the two is safest? Let’s be honest: we know Firefox did have its security problems as well. But anyone can look in the code and go hunting for security issues. And anyone can help to address those security issues once they are found. Closed-source software like Internet Explorer doesn’t have this benefit. therefore security bugs in Firefox are found and fixed faster.

4. develops and improves faster

Free software attracts more users than its non-free counterparts. Especially when the product is as good as that counterpart. therefore open-source software generally attracts more users and receives more and better feedback. This is necessary for improvement.
Also, many open-source projects tend to attract a good deal of programmers who work on the project in their free time. Most open-source projects are not limited by profits and therefore have no limit on developers that can participate.

5. more flexibility

Because the source-code is freely available, anyone who has the knowledge and needs to adjust some part of it can do so. If you need to have software X work on software Y you can take the code, make some adjustments and get them to work together (if they not already do so). Need a feature software X doesn’t have? Add it yourself. This is not possible with most closed-source software and definitely a lot harder when you can’t see the source code.

6. works lifelong

No more worries that one day you won’t be able to read your documents in format Z anymore because this format has become obsolete. If only the format was open-source. You still would be able to make this readable. That is because the open-source license doesn’t prohibit that the knowledge on how exactly you can read it is available to everyone.

7. respect for your hardware’s age

It seems like some companies that sell closed-source software have a secret deal with hardware manufacturers. Every time they upgrade their product you need the need the newest hardware to be able to play with all the new bloat (sometimes called features) that is introduced. Most open-source software projects have respect for hardware and make their software work with as little requirements as possible. Often more alternatives exist where you can choose the one that fits your hardware the most. Linux desktops are an example.

8. more power

As discussed above you can customize open-source software to your needs. A nice advantage this brings is that it becomes more powerful. You don’t need feature A? Take it out and save space and processing time. You need feature B to be more robust? Change it so it comes more robust. You’ll end up, not with what a company thinks you need, but with what you actually need. And that means more power.

9. freedom

Open-source is all about freedom. You, the end user are in control. With closed-source software the company that builds the software is in control. If it decides no longer to implement a feature you need, there’s very little you can do. If it decides that from now on you have to jump through loops to get the software activated, the only thing you can do is jump through loops. With open-source software you are not at the mercy of someone else because you have direct access to the source code. But there’s more freedom than that. “Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.” (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) Think about free as in “free speech”.

10. community support

Which software is more likely to attract a support community? One that is closed-source and makes profit from selling, or an open-source one that shares all it has with its community? People might think there is no support for a free product, but after making the reasoning above you might want to think different. And the proof is out there. I don’t think anyone can count the number of linux support sites that exist, its mailing lists and IRC channels, all there to help people when they have a question. While I think that developing open-source software and at the same time providing paid professional support for it is very interesting, there will always be users spending their free time trying to help people with their knowledge. If you have a problem, it’s very likely someone will have the answer for you.

Let me start by giving you some information about “De Lijn“. “De Lijn” is a Belgian company from the government that is responsible for bus and tram in Flanders (Flanders is a part of Belgium). If you ever visit Flanders and take a public bus or tram, you will be traveling with “De Lijn”.

Yesterday I was checking the timetables for the tram that drives along the coast and downloaded the PDF file with that information on it. I was a bit surprised to see that “PDF created with pdfFactory trial version www.pdffactory.com” was printed on every page.

When you take a look on the site of pdfFactory, you can read

Trial version prints a small banner on each page. Purchasing will remove the banner.

Obviously, “De Lijn” doesn’t work with a purchased version of pdfFactory. And for those of you thinking that they are testing this software out, to see whether it will make a good candidate for purchase: I can assure you that this notice is already there for a very long time.

Dissurion thinks it’s time to pay.