Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

I found an old idea I had for a blog. This is somewhat ironic, as I'm generally casting about frantically for ideas come... every other Tuesday morning. I think Doonesbury did an entire week on lack of viable blog topics. Granted, the implication was this "lack of topics" stemmed from the desire to update on a daily or even hourly basis. Sadly, I don't even have that problem and I still have writer's block.

Imagine my light-hearted glee at seeing an entry squirreled away in my Google Notebook under "Blog Topic Ideas." It's certainly understandable how I'd missed it... It's about niche search engines. Basically, these are search engines that aren't trying to catalog the entire world's information, just all the information on a certain topic.

The idea of niche searches isn't really new. There's a lot of them out there, and, by the very nature of the term "niche," they don't get a lot of mainstream attention. Furthermore, most people still find general search engines adequate to the task of searching for whatever topic the "niche" engine attempts to target. I ran across one that targets one of my own little niches.

That would be: Gazerk. I am, among other "-er's", a gamer. If there's a "-er" noun form of "long-winded," I'm that too. Gazerk is from Ziff Davis, who doesn't seem highly motivated to promote it, judging by current traffic figures in Alexa. Granted, I hardly take Alexa as gospel, but it's useful for comparisons if little else. Though niche, it's a fairly large one, targeted to a more net-savvy group, so I would have expected a bit more.

At the front door, there's little question of your options. There's box with a "SEARCH" button. Unlike the recently rechristened "iGoogle", there isn't a lot there to distract you. Type in the game you want information on, or, anything, and the results are provided, divided into gamer-centric categories. Categories include cheats, walkthroughs, videos, screenshots, reviews, previews, forums, and blogs. Those options cover pretty much the main courses of online gamer enthusiasm, neatly arrayed for your enjoyment.

It is this categorization, and presumably some additional focus given to what sites the engine chooses to display, that provides the draw for their target audience. Categories are nice, but no matter how well-accomplished architecturally the site is, the results are what matter. My initial test query was for "Lord of the Rings Online," (henceforth referred to as "LOTRO") the current ravenous parasite of my free time. I play on the "Silverlode" server, and no, my avatar's name doesn't have "Apollo" anywhere in it.

The first page of results covered the major internet gaming outlets sites devoted to LOTRO, including IGN, Gamespot, and Stratics. The "official" website about the game comes in at #4 in the results. Not too surprising, since it might be difficult algorithmically to pick out "official" sites. One interesting element to the results is the common use of subdomains with the game title, abbreviation, or some synonymous reference in the URL. For larger gaming networks, it's a common way to separate coverage of different games, but it certainly has utility for search engine optimization.

The only notably "bad" result was the ninth, which was the homepage of IGN's Anarchy Online subdomain. The page referenced IGN's "latest site," the LOTRO portal. Generally the first three pages all provided direct information from various sources around the web on the game itself. Moving deeper into the results, I started to find some confusion in the results among other recent "Lord of the Rings" themed games, but the early results were solid.

The categorized information was hit-or-miss. Being an MMO, there aren't "Cheats" in the classic sense of the term, so the results here generally lead nowhere or more quickly confused other similarly themed games. "Walkthroughs" was equally empty, providing only 8 results of which 0 referred to the correct game. "Videos" faired only slightly better, as there were some trailers and gameplay footage to be found, but again there was confusion among other Lord of the Rings themed games.

Things improved with the "Screenshots," "Previews," and "Reviews" categories, where more direct links to the major sites were provided, though IGN's Anarchy Online site remains a popular choice for Gazerk's LOTRO query. "Forms" provided an odd result, claiming over two thousand results but only giving about 22. Most of them were links to major gaming forum sites, some without any categories for the game itself. Finally, "Blogs" provided only 9 results. Paltry number, yet Gazerk did attempt to provide links to actual blog entries about the game, instead of just major gaming sites with blogs.

Overall, Gazerk's categories, which seem to be the major draw, didn't fair exceptionally well. The main search did provide nicely relevant results, and would lead anyone to a variety of authoritative online gaming destinations to learn more about the game. Having some way to better identify "official" sites might do them well. Repeating the query with quotes around the title didn't change the results, which might have helped remove some of the confusion the engine experienced in differentiating among games with similar Tolkien-inspired themes and names.

By way of comparison, Google provides many similar results (IGN, Gamespot, Lotrmmorpg.com) for the same query, but it places the official Turbine site as #1 and (naturally) tosses in Wikipedia for good measure. Gazerk provides a couple more "obscure" but still relevant sites up front, while Google eventually starts serving up Slashdot and Digg posts, which only reference the game obliquely. Comparing the top 10 results, it's pretty much a tie, but I'll give the deeper results to Gazerk. Google seems easily led astray by authority sites.

Will I use Gazerk for all my gaming queries from now on? No, not really. Though I realize people always point to the fact that there's basically "zero cost" to changing search engines, I think they also overlook another factor- pure laziness. In the battle that ends with a draw, I'll stick with what I'm comfortable with.

Besides, if I'm annoyed by Digg, Slashdot, and Wikipedia clogging up my gaming search results I can always use Google Co-op. I still haven't figured out why it's called "Co-op," when "Google Custom Search Engine" would make me remember what it is a lot easier. As it stands, I have to search for the thing every time I need to remember what it is, and I always go "oh yeah, they called it 'Co-op'!" And I'm still confused...

Anyway, Co-op lets you pick a group of sites for Google to search. It provides results from only the sites you pick (and, of course, only pages on those sites within the index). One could go ahead and pick out all those big gaming sites, roll them into "Co-op" and pretty much do what Gazerk does, only without the "category" functionality. It's like the "site:" operator search evolving from the primordial ooze.

Other acceptable similes:

• It's like the "site:" operator search all gown up.
• It's like the "site:" operator search graduating from college.
• It's like the "site:" operator search getting a new set of wheels.

Personally, I'm more a metaphor man myself.