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Quote  |  Misc

Did Google kill RSS?

13 Mar 2013

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.

Aldo Cortesi from Google, destroyer of ecosystems

My RSS consumption was at an all-time high in the few years prior to Google Reader coming out. Once I migrated from a desktop RSS reader to Google Reader, I found myself opening it less often. Over the years, it's fallen off my radar. I only check a few times a month. Did Google kill RSS? On purpose? Accidental? Is RSS dead? Do we all need to rely on the sites we "follow" now via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? Better? Worse? Inevitable?

Video  |  UX

What are your users searching for?

17 Dec 2012

Great video to highlight how important it is to monitor how your users are searching for your products. Are there alternate spellings, abbreviations, and/or pop-culture slang that they might be searching for that you’re search indexes aren’t accounting for?

In many of our e-commerce projects, we’ve worked on a handful of solutions to address this. For example, a product like “LA Vacation” could be found under a number of possible searches:

  • Los Angeles
  • L.A.
  • SoCal
  • City of Angels

The great thing with most search index tools is that you can shove a lot of additional keywords without having to expose this to your users in some archaic list on the site.

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