What it looks like when Google links to your website | Hacker News Reader

What it looks like when Google links to your website

raaw.se

118 pointsPeterRosdahl64 comments

Congrats! I love alternativeTo. It's my way to train parents and friends to find the best free alternatives to whatever ad-bloated software SEO'd their way to the top of Google last time they decided they needed to convert a movie or download music.

This simple piece of advice (and a bookmark in their favorite browser) has greatly reduced the amount of PC rebuilding I've had to do for them over the years!

Thank you, that's so great to hear.

hey alternativeTo team,

congratulations!

at this achievement, i hope you will put some effort (also) in improving the UX of the site so that users like me get keep visiting whenever we want an alternative.

Some observations (at http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/ page):

- Ads are covering a large part of the area

- The list of alternatives are not prominently visible (need to scroll down)

- UI is a bit cluttered (offering too many options)

One thing that's bothered me almost every time I visited your awesome site over the last few years is that the link to the actual product is quite small and hard to see, in both places.

For me personally a big "Go to site" button would make the site even nicer.

Thanks, we'll be sure to think about how we can make this better. The button/link is actually pretty big for all apps that don't have any additional links (like to app stores). See AOL Reader as an example. Is that reasonable or would you prefer something else?

http://alternativeto.net/software/aol-reader/

Keep it simple.

I want a big, shiny button that links me to the content I want.

When I click on one of the software, I don't read the blue box. I scroll down and then click on an alternative. Then "what the?! I'm on the same kind of page again!" I scroll down, click on alternative... and repeat this again and again. Oh! Now this page has a big green "download" button! Awesome! click it Oh. It's an ad.

This was my reaction when I first visited the website just now.

Make the main link bigger. If it has a download link, make it big. If it doesn't? Make the website link bigger. I shouldn't have to think. I'm confused.

(Of course, I'm dumbing myself down on purpose when testing websites)

Thank you for great feedback, very much appreciated! We will definitely try to make things very obvious when it comes to leaving our site for the final destination that should be an applications website or an app store.

I also answered some of these thoughts in my reply to imdhmd.

I really like your site, it's the place I go when I look for an alternative to a specific app/webapp. I'm going to assume that most of your users are like me and come through your site by a google search. Some feedback:

- The main issue with your site is imho that it's trying to do two things at once. Next to giving alternatives to software, it also tries to be a categorized directory of applications. I would love for you to focus on only the former. Doing so would enable you to really declutter your site. There would be no more need for the grey navigation bar, nor for categories or tags.

- Give more prominence to: - The application searched for and to its external links. Don't be afraid to have users leave your site. - It's alternatives, on my laptop I can only see a single alternative above the fold. - User input, e.g. likes, comments and feedback. As you're a user input driven site, this is really important

- Give less prominence to or simply remove: - Questions, they look really empty and sites like http://webapps.stackexchange.com/ are better suited for this. - Forum, when looking for an alternative I simply want to take a look at a few options I don't much care for the forum - Recent user activities, I think it is simply clutter and no one but the person whose activity it shows cares.

Great feedback and ideas, thanks! I think I have answered much of it in my reply to imdhmd above.

I see the point you make about Questions. We'll consider this!

Thank you!

We're always trying to improve the site but the design for the desktop version of the site hasn't been worked very much on lately. We are aware that there is always room for improvement.

Ads: we need them. Sorry.

List of alternatives not prominently visible: The problem here is that we don't know exactly why a visitor is coming to an application page. It could be to find alternatives to the application or it could be that they are interested in the selected application because it was listed as n alternative to something they want to replace. I absolutely understand what you're talking about here and we have some plans already to make this better, but after we discussed your comment we came up with a even better solution that we hope we can do something about this fall.

UI is cluttered: We have plan to hide more stuff. There is a plan.

Thanks a lot for the great feedback! We appreciate it.

I'd like to hear how they were able to handle the dramatic increase in traffic over such a short period of time.

With out getting to specific into their backend (because I dont know what theirs is) I'd assume they must of prepared for Google Reader deadline

> Without getting too specific into their backend (because I dont know what theirs is) I'd assume they must have prepared for Google Reader's deadline

Assuming ESL; legitimately trying to be helpful :)

It was actually pretty easy to deal with. Since we usually have around 50-70K visitors/day we are used to a lot of traffic.

Our setup is one Windows Server 2008 R2 with 12gb RAM and Intel Xeon E5520 @ 2.27Ghz with 8 cores. The page is built with ASP.NET MVC + Web Forms (The alternative page is Web forms).

Anyway, ASP.NET scale really really well and since only a small % actually login to the site we can just cache more or less everything. Usually when sites go down because of massive traffic increases i think there is some kind of bug somewhere or they are just being blocked by their hosting provider.

/Ola (From AlternativeTo)

"...AlternativeTo had about 217.000 visitors on that first day..."

Why can't we all agree upon a universal, consistent notation for math and science?

</tangential>

I agree! It's a mess. We're based in Sweden so we do it this way.

Agreed. Three decimal places is awfully high precision for a measurement of people.

The metric system still fails to impose itself universally, so we can wait some time before the decimal mark is unified...

The 2006 CIA Factbook stated that the "US is the only industrialized nation that does not mainly use the metric system", (in addition to non-industrialised Burma/Myanmar and Liberia).

This particular case is not English vs. Metric, but rather lack of cohesion in the metric system.

English: Use commas for separating thousands, use periods for decimals.

Metric: Use spaces for separating thousands, use periods OR commas for decimals.

In this instance, the English approach is obviously the superior one, as spaces are more confusing to use as a delimiter than commas, and there should only be one way to write decimals for consistency.

There is some other system that uses periods for thousands and commas for decimals - the exact reverse of what you've listed as the english convention. I always thought it was a european convention. It makes more sense than what you've listed as the metric convention.

Esperanto and Interlingua both use that convention.

Indeed, and that is what I've seen from many Europeans.

However, I think that must be a convention from before the universal adoption of the metric system by the EU, as the 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures (held in 2003) declared that the symbol for decimals should be "the point on the line or the comma on the line".

i.e. the official metric system symbol is period or comma, regardless of what actual Europeans use.

http://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/Resol22CGPM-EN.pdf [page 11]

>i.e. the official metric system symbol is period or comma, regardless of what actual Europeans use.

Regardless? Those (and mainly comma) is exactly what Europeans use. It's not like there is some other symbol besides those too in use for that purpose.

Yes, there is another convention. (spaces)+(commas or periods) != (periods)+(commas)

What you are talking about is a European convention, not a metric convention. There is a difference.

>This particular case is not English vs. Metric, but rather lack of cohesion in the metric system.

Yes, and the grand-parent already said that this particular case is insignificant compared to English vs Metric.

Let's first fix this, and then we worry about decimal separator.

I´m european and the natural way for me is period for thousands and commas for decimals, although I´m aware of the imperial way, with commas for thousands and periods for decimals.

Another important difference is that in Europe we understand a billion as a million of millions (10^12), not a thousand of millions (10^9). For us, a 10^9 is a miliard. Luckily I´m also aware of the use of billions for 10^12 and whenever I read it on a US or UK text I understand correctly. Otherwise, saying that there are 7 billion people on Earth would be an extreme exageration...

US, UK and Russia use billion in this strange way

s/217.000/217'000/ FIFY

217.000,00 FIFY

Actually, no. The way he wrote it is (one of) the official way(s) to do it in Sweden.

That's the joke. There are about a dozen different language and cultural dependent "standards" for writing decimal separators and number groupings.

I especially like the ambiguity you get in those cases where some places use the period as decimal separator and the period as number grouping character and then other places do it the other way around.

On a slightly different tangent, why do people put the dollar sign in front of the numer?

I believe that was inherited from how the British pound sign is written: £100 rather than 100£ has long been the standard. But I don't know why, where, or when the British usage originated.

Maybe because: $1 25¢

So that's like writing: Kg 19 300 g

I understand it's tradition, but the fact that people keep using it kills me. Especially when people start using kilo $, and in "$ 100K".

Tip: It's written with a lower-case k. Capital K in front of B means 1024 to some people (including me), but 1000 is always written as k.

Thanks. You are correct about lower case k for kilo (but upper case for mega and up), but the official unit for 1024 bytes is the kibibyte, which is KiB:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

That's why I said "Capital K in front of B means 1024 to some people".

this is why I usually use spaces to separate thousands, so that I don't confuse people expecting either notation.

The standard where I'm from is also a period for thousands, and a comma for the decimal fraction, but reading as much English scientific and computing literature, I am well aware that the period for decimal fraction is almost a de facto standard. So I tend to use spaces for the thousands and a period for the decimal fraction, so that anyone who sees the spaces can infer what the other symbol means.

Fortunately I am not aware of any notation system that uses a space to separate the decimal fraction :)

This takes me back to 20 years ago when I was studying Japanese. Their traditional (pre-Arabic-numerals) system uses four-digit groupings instead of three: There are characters for ten, hundred, thousand, and ten-thousand. (I assume Chinese is similar.)

Sometimes we use the number "1 million" to mean "a lot"; in that system it would be written as 100 ten-thousands. A more "natural" way to express "a lot" in that system is ten-thousand ten-thousands, or 100 million in our system.

I loved learning little "weird" things like that, and discovering that our own way of doing things isn't the only way. Studying other cultures also teaches us about our own.

Any better-qualified Japanese speakers please correct anything I've gotten wrong, this memory file was just swapped in from 20 years ago...

India uses a system sort of like that as well, even in English. The first major multiple is thousands, like in the western system, but then it goes in multiples of 100 above that: a lakh is 100 thousands (written 1,00,000), and a crore is 100 lakh (10 million, written 1,00,00,000).

Or use the engineering notation: 217k users.

> 2.17e5

FTFY

I have little trouble reading period for thousands separation. Complaining about MM/DD/YYYY date formatting is something that I whinge about way more often.

PS: I'm an Aussie living in the US.

When I saw the link on the "reader is dead" page, I thought oh man alternativeTo is going to blow up... I hope they're ready.

I felt good for them. They really need more recognition.

Thanks to both of you!

I agree, it couldn't have happened to a nicer site.

We've also had a lot of traffic to https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader as people look for Reader alternatives. Google should do this more often.

What a great idea. They should make a website so that when people search it gives them a suggestion of a site based on their query.

Not sure you'll see this, but this is what your page looks like on my browser:

http://www.livmathssoc.org.uk/images/AlternativeTo.png

I have, of course, scrolled down past the image. It took some considerable time before I realized there was any text there.

Just thought you'd like to know.

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) 
    Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

(don't ask)

Hi Colin,

I just HAVE to ask :)

Anyway, that doesn't look good and I'm sorry for that. I use a Wordpress theme that I bought and I guess it just doesn't support your browser.

In short ...

Some time ago I needed a machine that lets me browse the internet, write programs, deal with email, connect with Skype, and run a small wiki. More, it needed to have roughly an A5 footprint, more-or-less 210 mm x 150 mm. The Asus Eeee running a variant of Linux fitted my needs perfectly. It has a perfectly usable keyboard, and drives almost every projector without problem.

It's still running, and has now been extensively personalized. However, upgrading the browser has repeatedly defeated me. Until recently that hasn't been a problem, most website are still usable, although sometimes (but not always!) the "mobile" version is better/more tolerant than the "desktop" version. It's only in the last few months that there are web sites that simply don't work. For them I often drop to a command line, pull the html directly, post-process with a AWK script, and read the extracted text.

Interestingly, sometimes that's faster than my desktop rendering the full page, with ads, images, and analytics slowing everything down.

I was pretty surprised to read that (apparently) Google did this without even a heads up to alternativeTo. Seems like it would have at least been polite, if nothing else ...

I wrote an open source project and when I landed on the first page of Google's search results, my traffic spiked and continually stays at about 10k-15k requests per week. Before hitting Google's first page of results, I was down in the 1k-2k range.

Markus, what license is the content of AlternativeTo under? Have you considered one of the Creative Commons licenses like Stack Overflow?

We haven't thought that much about it actually. The only experience I have with it is that the whole web is filled with crappy spam sites that is using the content from Stack Overflow to earn a few extra bucks and that is kind of irritating.

Maybe someone has done something really useful with the data as well that i don't know about though.

But if someone have any awesome idea and want to do something together we are always listening :)

/Ola

Spam sites are definitely a legitimate concern.

I really love the idea of AlternativeTo, but unfortunately don't feel comfortable adding content unless my contributions will be under an open license. So I'm not sure what great stuff could be done with the data (though I bet there is something) but you might get more users if you go with a CC license.

Probably one of the reasons Google linked to them, is that they have so many Google ads on their pages (3 of them - quite disturbing to me). And Google takes about 32% of the price paid by the advertiser.

Just a back-of-the-envelope calculation: let's assume 217000 page views, with a 1% CTR, and a 1$ CPC. The result (of that 1 day) : ~2000$.

There's no way $2000 even factored into Google's decision of who to link to.

Or because they had good alternatives to Google Reader that would be updated and voted on by a good user-base? No, nevermind, can't be that.

Both 1% CTR and $1 CPC are more than you would expect from average website. Across all my websites I have 0.38% CTR and $0.27 CPC.

The result is then ~ $200, not $2000.

I'm not interested in arguing about Google's reasons for linking to us but I just wanted to point out that it was not 217.000 pageviews but rather "users" or "uniques". Pageviews were 2-3 times that number.

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