Your Web Site Sucks
October 1999
By Tom Barnes

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Offended? Think I haven't been to your web site? Think I'm a new web evangelist who just logged on to AOL this year? Think I'm just an idiot? Perhaps the latter is true-- but certainly not the former. I've been working with Internet companies since before the telecom bill passed. I say your website sucks because practically ALL websites suck. I should know. I have three of them.

Here are the four reasons why:

First, bandwith.. There's not enough yet. Nobody likes to surf the web, because, even if they have a T3 line (if you don't know what a T3 line is skip the rest of this and go listen to the System Of A Down CD. It kicks ass.) it's still too slow.

Second: Search Engines. They don't work. Smarty-pants marketers stuff them with spam to send unsuspecting neophytes to their gambling or nudie site. Search engines take too long too. Boolean logic has a long way to go. It's a cool idea that hasn't quite been implemented properly.

Most folks need to hit seven to ten sites before they get what they were looking for. If they're lucky. Soon someone will access its power but it hasn't happened yet. Don't believe me? Here's what the Web Site Journal said: "Studies show that the extent to which search engines can index the web is dropping. A 1998 study by NEC Research Institute found that only one third of the Web was indexed by search engines! but the 1999 numbers have dropped to one sixth of the Web! So who has the volume of indexed Web pages available for searching?

Search Engine: Volume of the web indexed by percentage:

• Northern Light 15.5 %
• Snap 15.5 %
• AltaVista 15.5 %
• HotBot 99 11.3 %
• HotBot 98 34 %
• Microsoft 8 %
• Infoseek 8 %
• Google 7.8 %
• Yahoo! 7.4 %
• Excite 5.6 %
• Lycos 2.5 %
• Euroseek 2.2 %

Data provided by NUA Internet Surveys

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