Modeling Linking on the Web 131
An Anonymous Coward writes "Amazon has a much greater market share among online bookstores compared to the greatest market share for offline stores. How is this possible? Because the web changes how people find information. There are millions of links to Amazon on the web, which makes it more likely for people to find Amazon when surfing the web, or when using search engines which typically use link popularity in ranking. This makes it harder for new businesses to compete. Researchers have discovered that across the entire web, links are distributed according to a "power law" which leads to "rich get richer" or "winner's take all" behaviour where a small number of sites get the vast majority of links and traffic. A new study just released by NEC shows that this behaviour varies in different communities, and shows how to predict competition in different areas. For example, you can see how much tougher competition is among booksellers compared to photographers."
Proving dot-commers weren't so crazy (Score:3, Interesting)
No no, they were (Score:2)
What a shocker. (Score:2)
No kidding. Look at the hit counter on my homepage, and compare it to Slashdot's. I've probably gotten as many hits in the last year as Slashdot has gotten since I started typing this reply.
I'm off to work now, so I don't have time to check, but does the article address the massive amount of advertising that Amazon did to get where it is today? Inertia has to come from somewhere.
--saint
Re:What a shocker. (Score:1)
Re:What a shocker. (Score:2)
Re:What a shocker. (Score:1)
Re:What a shocker. (Score:2)
For anonymous cowards to be profane to the point of incoherency. Thanks for proving me right!
--saint
Gee, Name recognition should have some bearing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ask people off the street where they would buy books on the internet... and your bound to get many replies of Amazon or "I don't know".
I suppose by their logic that the only place to be on the web is AOL... but on the street you could get that response as well.
Advertising does pay. Links on the net may lean towards one provider over another, but most of them were bought by one method or not.
One reason the rich get richer is because they are optimist, they are willing to do it now. The best time to start a business is always TODAY... the best time to get your name out there is ALWAYS today.
Re:Gee, Name recognition should have some bearing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people associate even the concept of purchasing something online with Amazon... they were pioneers, and managed (using linking, etc) to embed themselves in the mind of the consumer. I must admit; even though I may like to think of myself as one who resists marketing, when I need to buy a book online, where's the first place I think of going? Amazon.
Insidious, ain't it?
I am the village idiot i don't have anything to do with this pathetic little opera i just felt like passing through... - PDQ Bach
trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait until online buying settles down a bit, and everyone gets used to buying stuff everywhere. Then wait for VISA to become more secure (read : Hardware cardreader devices at home, which is inevitable) or for banks to do direct transactions between you and the book reseller. THEN we can start to evaluate models.
Re:trust (Score:1)
Would you have considered Verizon to be an 'obscure' domain?
It just might be that the lesser-known companies might be a bit safer in the long run, simply because (and yes, this is highly speculative) the malicious script-kiddies (ok, and some actual malicious hackers) haven't heard of them.
Re:trust (Score:2)
But John Q. Average doesn't know that... In belgium there were 2 online resellers of CDs and books. One of them made a deal with a big bank and a movie complex to have its URL printed on tickes and receipts. Good publicity, indeed, but much more important : the association of the URL with something trustable.
I thing online internet sales is a market where, right now at least, there IS bad publicity because people rae still too supicious and won't take risks.
Re:trust (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:trust (Score:2)
I can hardly believe that using HW at home to authenticate/secure connection & card integrity is going to increase abuse. And with such devices, the transaction company has more means of tracking you.
Re:trust (Score:5, Insightful)
How would a hardware card reader at home help anything? Havn't you even followed the whole satellite-stealing saga? If you give the end user control of the hardware, you can't trust it, period.
Geez, I get tired of correcting this misperception on /.
The pay TV systems are the worst thing that has ever happened to smart cards. There are numerous reasons why they're insecure, and those reasons do not apply to other systems, particularly not credit card systems.
First, pay TV engineers have an essentially intractable problem. No security system is unbreakable and the problem is particularly difficult when the attacker has unlimited access to key components of the system (as is the case with all smart card systems). However, the pay TV guys have the additional complication that satellite television is *broadcasted*. That means that every card is doing the same thing with the same keys and the same data, which in turn means that breaking one card essentially breaks all of them (or at least a large number of them).
To try to manage this risk, the pay TV designers use flashable cards and a security-by-obscurity approach. In most environments flashable cards are a very bad idea, because you want to make sure that attackers cannot fiddle with your software. In this situation, it permits the system designers to modify their system frequently and remotely, to make it obscure again and shut down all the existing pirate cards. OTOH, flashable cards are easier for attackers to fiddle with. The result is that every update is broken within a few months, but most breaks are disabled within a few months, and that keeps the whole thing in the news all of the time.
Nearly every other smart card system can take a different approach, one in which (a) the card is expected to be secure for a few years and then replaced and (b) the break of a single card does not compromise the whole system.
Card-unique keys, key rotation, audit mechanisms, hotlists and moderately frequent on-line validations are all tools used by careful designers to ensure that breaking one card does not break the whole system, and that broken cards can quickly be detected and shut down.
When you add those tools to the security measures offered by the card itself (such as S/D PA resistance, environmental monitoring, security-sensitive layering, chemically-similar protective shields, etc.) the result can be a highly secure system.
The job of a smart card system designer is easy to state: Design a system such that the cost of breaking a single card is much higher than the value of breaking that card. A good estimate for the cost in expertise and equipment to break (extract the secrets from) a single, modern, well-designed card is about $250,000, give or take a little. As the card ages and new attacks are devised, that cost goes down. Meanwhile, card manufacturers make changes to defeat the new attacks, raising the bar again for new cards.
For credit cards, this is an easy thing to do. Not only are the cards unique, used on-line frequently (whether at home or at a merchant) and replaced regularly, the possessor of the card is generally motivated to maintain the secrecy of the information in it. Further, the job of the card is identification and authentication, rather than decryption, which is a completely different problem from that of pay TV cards.
Secure smart card credit cards are easy for a variety of other reasons that I won't go into, but perhapes the most important is that there is already a significant and mostly workable security infrastructure in place that doesn't need the cards themselves to provide any security. This model breaks down to some degree for on-line transactions and a chip card is a perfect way to close that loophole.
It's true that nothing is completely secure, but it's also true that nothing has to be completely secure. Success in security is when the attackers decide to find an easier target.
Re:trust (Score:2)
Re:trust (Score:2)
However, the power law also holds true for non e-commerce related sites. I.e. yahoo, google, etc. In effect, you're arguing the example ("amazon") rather than the actual theory.
Re:trust (Score:2)
Wait until online buying settles down
Yes, if you wait long enough you will be able to know with certainty... but by that point, how useful will that knowledge be??
From studies already available, it's looking like the final conclusive model will be end up along the lines of Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. If you believe these numbers, it looks like there may yet be time left to learn from the success of Amazon and others and apply it in other categories (hey, I oughta take that advise for my little site....) Doing it without massive debt would be the real trick!
Trust -- credit cards aren't the problem (Score:2)
Credit cards are not the major problem. If you get scammed online, you can get a refund from Visa. A bit of work, but not a huge deal, and it is not very common. (Visa kicks out merchants who scam.)
The real problem is not going to go away: will the merchant ship my order in a correct and timely fashion? This is the *exact* same problem faced by the old "mail-order catalog" business. That business is over a hundred years old and the problem still persists, reputation matters a lot.
How to fulfill orders promptly and correctly is a *huge* difficult problem, involving massive automation, computerization, use of bar codes, etc.
Scale-Free Networks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Scale-Free Networks (Score:5, Informative)
There are a quite few papers on this topic (behaviour of disordered networks) by Barabasi and one of his research students, Reka Albert (now probably graduated), most of which are available from his research group's website [nd.edu] or from arXiv [arxiv.org].
Particular highlights:
A-L. Barabasi and R. Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks [arxiv.org], Science 286, 509, (1999)
A-L. Barabasi, R. Albert and H. Jeong, Scale-free characteristics of random networks: The topology of the World Wide Web [nd.edu], Physica A 281, 69-77 (2000).
A-L. Barabasi and R. Albert, Topology of evolving networks: local events and universality [arxiv.org], Physcal Review Letters 85 5234 (2000).
This work is an interesting counterpoint to the 'small world' networks [columbia.edu] of Watts and Strogatz:
D.J. Watts and S.H. Strogatz, Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks, Nature 393, 440-442, (1998).
D.J. Watts, Small Worlds [amazon.com], Princeton University Press, (1999).
Re:Scale-Free Networks (Score:1)
For more info, see www.uggr.com [uggr.com]
What about the biggest e-commerce of them all? (Score:3, Funny)
And can you provide a few links there as well? Just to "sample"
Re:What about the biggest e-commerce of them all? (Score:2, Funny)
how "hard" is it to "enter" the pornography industry?
Sure I can give you links to test. (Score:1, Troll)
My Favorite [persiankitty.com]
No pop-ups, but limited selection [sublimedirectory.com]
S'okay [jpeg4free.com]
Spanish language listing, but you can figure out what "Galeria de teens" translates to. [tgpsexogratis.com]
Re:What about the biggest e-commerce of them all? (Score:1)
Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly they came in late, after all the other search engines were established, but they ate up market share and eye balls because they were (and are) better.
So I could imagine that there are some Amazon-killers out there or that at least there could be...
Re:Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
Amazon gives me headaches with all their fsking commercials and screaming colors. I don't go there unless I really can't find my info anywhere else. The opposite with Google : their layout is so nice I sometimes find myself just googling away for fun... like the old days when the internet was still fun to explore.
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Have they made money yet?
Until they do, they aren't a success in the sense that they will be around for a long time. Just being good isn't enough. You also have to make money.
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Google has been profitable for quite some time... Just do a search on Google with the keywords "Google Profitable"...
Re:Google? (Score:2)
Give google a few years...
Not everyone has a problem with Amazon (Score:2, Informative)
Also whats with the Anti-Amazon sentiment? What exactly is wrong with a company surviving in part due to ad revenue? Does the immature desire for online companies to try to function in this world without advertising revenue still exist? Do you not know that Google has paid ads, in text form, on their site as well? And that they derive a lot of revenue by being the engines under AOL's and Yahoo's search engines?
Re:Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
When Google hit the scene, search absolutely sucked so there's was an existing scratch that needed itching and to scratch that itch, all you did was search from a different page.
So the user got a massive reward from a tiny change. But with Amazon, there's not that much pain in the mind of the online consumer. One-click ordering. Recommendations. Reviews. A very usable site by many standards.
But switching from Amazon to another bookstore requires a good amount of hassle... MUCH more effort than switching search engines and offers a much smaller reward than Google offered to frustrated internet searchers.
Re:Google? (Score:2)
It's nice to hope though
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Not likely, considering Amazon's penchant for patenting their (dead obvious) functionality. Hooray for the USPTO! Yeah!
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Re:Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
I love Google, but I wonder sometimes if at the same time it makes it easy to find good sites, it also inherently keeps other good sites down (relative to the high ranked sites).
Prehaps not... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm in Ireland and since the euro came in to being I've stopped ordering from the UK or US versions of Amazon, and other retailers for that matter.
With currency and shipping costs they were killing me. I now look for eurozone suppliers.
I'd still love a good Irish online store though, just to save shipping, but the are all crap half assed efforts.
At least my french and german will improve while browsing.
Rich get richer? (Score:1)
It takes money to make money. Always has and always will.
not a cuase but an effect (Score:2, Interesting)
I also think that the "rich-gets-richer" thing is more about economics than about the number of links a site gets. Amazon buys bigger quantities, and ships more quantities which means that the economies of scale are a HUGE factor. I would venture that the number of links will be a trailing indicator of the relative size of a retailer much more than a contributor to this relative size.
To sum up logistics, economies of scale...intro economics anyone?
Booksellers vs. photographers? Bad example. (Score:2, Insightful)
They may specialize and carry more of certain kinds of books, but you won't see much difference between The Hunchback of Notre Dame as carried by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
Meanwhile, each and every photographer has his or her own unique vision which they commit to film. Two photographers can snap pictures of the same subject, but composition of each shot would be different.
Booksellers usually sell the same goods. Photographers usually sell their own product, which can't be found anywhere else.
Re:Booksellers vs. photographers? Bad example. (Score:1)
power law (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:power law (Score:4, Informative)
And a Zipf law is a power law on ranks, rather than values.
Lada Adamic of HP has an excellent how-to on power law distibutions [hp.com] you might find interesting.
Critical mass (Score:2)
Slashdot type boards might be an exception since their interest - their value (or perceived value) to readers, their content, is defined by the probability of a reader writing something, which is the most interesting factor to take into account. Of course, once enough readers are there, statistical odds of a story getting a full compliment are very high, and thus good content. Slashdot seems to be past that critical mass.
Then come the trolls.
Re:Critical mass (Score:2)
/.'s responsibility (Score:1)
That's why I like the stories on small innovative projects best. The fact, that a new Apache release is out, will reach you anyway.
Although user contributions adhere the same critical mass principle, good editing can counter the effect and thus provide news, that you won't find everywhere else. I hope, Slashdot will be able to keep its quality...
Duck
Obvious (Score:1)
SOC (Score:2, Insightful)
No, seriously: it doesn't look like the article is making that particular connection, thank goodness. Per Bak's theory of self-organized criticality predicts power law distributions of many things under many conditions, so people (or, specifically, Bak fans) often get all excited whenever they see a power law and start saying, "Hey, it's SOC!" But there are many ways to get power laws, and of course the logic doesn't work: "SOC gives power laws; thus if it has a power law, it was caused by SOC."
If you want to know more about SOC, you can check out Bak's modestly-titled book, How Nature Works.
Other studies (Score:1)
I did a dissertation on something similar a while back, due to a paper by S. Redner:
Redner, S. (1998). How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution. [bu.edu]
This paper looked at how the citing of academic papers follows a power law distribution - that many papers are never cited, some are cited a few times, but a tiny percentage get cited a massive number of times.
My dissertation actually looked at whether this could be applied to the more general concept of ideas: whether there are lots of good ideas, some never catch on, some catch on a little bit, whilst a tiny proportion explode with popularity. I wrote a little java app to model it.
the Java program... (Score:1)
Semantics Correction (Score:2)
No, no, no. This is an abstract discussion of new avenues in Communication Theory as exposed by the Internet. Therefore we must apply Internet-specific terminology to our discussion. "Photographers" should read "Pornographers." Thank you.
Power law (Score:1)
Re:Power law (Score:1)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch
seems that this appplies not only to natural phenoms (earthquake size X rank ~= constant) but also human activities: city size (#10 has roughly 1/10 pop. as #1, #100 ~= 1/100) and even "corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed".
so it's not surprising that the web is zipfian...
Bad news for Independent Artists? (Score:2)
I've always been sceptical of this argument because I think the effect of promotion is a lot greater than people generally believe. A musician playing live can generate a little local word of mouth - but how do you translate that into a wider appeal?
This adds another reason to be sceptical. So maybe getting onto Amazon's stocklist/recommendations will become more important than getting on a radio playlist?
Re:Bad news for Independent Artists? (Score:1)
Think about it like this:
You have a good band, that people want to hear. If you self promote, you can only reach a few hundred people at once to begin with. And only say 1% will tell a friend. And only 1% of them will tell a friend.
So then you self promote to radio stations. Figuring you send a copy of your demo to a few hundred radio stations, and only about 1% of them will play it. But they are playing it out to hundreds more people who also might tell a friend. And so on.
Then you have to figure out how to get the CDs to people to sell for you, or be in all these places when it plays on the radio (impossible).
Now a BIG record company can just take a good band, and with one move drop it on 1000s of Viacom, GE, Disney, AOL/TW TV and Radio outlets, 2461 magazines, 100,000 websites, and then move the product into 200,000 record stores the same day.
And so everyone in the human population who will possibly like the band hears it all at once or hears it from a friend within WEEKS. This wouldn't be a problem but for the fact they (the big record companies) are doing it soley as entertainment soley for profit, rather than the classic uses of music (artistic, social change, etc.). Which is depressing.
The independents now at least have the internet, which raises the POSSIBILITY of reaching all those people at once, but there is a high noise to signal ratio, and the audience is also the director, meaning they are not CAPTIVE. So, you have to be monumentally interesting, entertaining, AND know how to get people to come to your website to sell music online.
Doing all these things is definitely easier than the classic touring and underground zine methods of old, but it's still difficult.
No one ever said being a professional musician is easy. It's a FULL TIME *JOB*, and the harder you work, the more success you will find. But, just as not all businessmen become rich executives, not everyone can top Billboard..
But dammit, it is the funnest hard job I've ever had.
Re:Bad news for Independent Artists? (Score:1)
Re:Bad news for Independent Artists? (Score:2)
In general it's a combination of decades of getting information and entertainment from a small number corporate sources, as well as the tendancy to gather where others are.
Still, while this paints a picture in which the majority will always go back to a few sources, ignoring the rest, at least in the digital age, those of us who do want to go discover an unheard of musician, writer or artist from remote locations have a much easier time doing so.
Re:Bad news for Independent Artists? (Score:2)
Whilst I don't necessarily disagree I question the 'much easier' part. They still have to have some way of letting you know that their site exists and that it contains something you might like. That'll mean advertising in some form.
Tyranny of majority = PageRank (Score:2, Informative)
This article is basically a fancy way of confirming the tyranny of the majority. Google's PageRank, as good as it is, both a) suffers from and b) perpetuates the tyranny of the majority (aka "the rich get richer", the "power law"). IE, the more links, the higher the pagerank, the more relevance, the more hits, the more links...
Teoma seems to be aiming at this chink in Google's armor.
From Teoma's page [teoma.com],...
Using vectoring algorithms to find themed hives of related content, Teoma partitions the power law into manageable chunks. IE, the rich get richer, but at least a dominant site in one field doesn't get artificially inflated relevance when querying an unrelated field. At least in theory. (Kinda like laws are supposed to keep a monopoly from illegally entering other markets, but I digress.)
This is working for Teoma: I (and others) are finding useful stuff on Teoma that Google didn't.
Google is already aware of this particular limitation of PageRank, as can be seen from what they suggest programmers submit to their programming contest [google.com]...
Even with all that, I still think that humans are the best filters (and isn't a search engine just a programmable filter?). I suspect the rise of weblogs might have something to do with the usefulness found in tapping into some weblogger's idea of what's useful/cool/interesting.
So perhaps the best way to find good info is a cross between a human and a content-vectoring search algorithm. Maybe that's why Ask Jeeves bought Teoma [com.com].
Google already does this (Score:2)
In general search results, Google ranks a page based not just on its PR (ie on how many pages link to it and their overall quality) but on the TITLEs of those pages and the anchor text of the links. So Microsoft could put the string "book reviews" on their home page but they'd still rank behind me on a search for "book reviews" [google.com], because none of their incoming links are from pages about book reviews.
Danny.
Feedback Loops & Linking (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all fairly obvious. The neat thing is how these messages and the messages they point to interact. Dr. Wiener says that the more unique a message, the more "important" it is. This is simply because an overused message (a cliche) quickly becomes filtered by the human mind, and loses its meaning.
Take the Amazon example, for instance: How often do you click a LINK to Amazon? Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of links to Amazon, but I would guess most of them NEVER get clicked. Why? Because there are too many of them. The first time I saw one, I followed it, but now I just ignore them. I almost never click on Amazon links because I know it goes to some bookstore.
When I do go to Amazon, I just type the DOMAIN name into my browser, and go directly there, and do my own searching, follow my own links.
So, basically, there is an upper limit to the number of links before they essentially become useless. Of course, this upper limit is dependent on the total number of users who haven't seen the links, which is increasing every day as new people come on to the web. As the number of links reach this critical mass, more and more people are just typing in the domain name rather than following a link.
This is Google's essential flaw. It does not recognize that a site like Amazon does not need an entry in a search engine. There are enough links out there already for just about anyone to find it. Google should instead group searches around a bell curve distribution, where the sites with the medium number of links have the highest relevance, with underlinked and overlinked sites falling off the ends.
How are new sites found out about and linked enough to show up in an engine like Google? Advertising. Mostly word of mouth and link ads, and in certain cases print and television advertising (although this is less effective, because it requires the user additional steps to make use of the message (ie: remembering the domain name at a much later time and then typing it in), which is why the
Really, to be effective, you need to have 10-20 contacts online, have each link to your site. Spread the word as much as you can. And save your ad budget until your word of mouth traffic reaches critical mass. Then spend it on bandwidth.
Really, time is the only key. Oh, and having something useful or funny.
Anyway, this quickly turned to the theories of getting a lot of hits, and I apologize, but you can see that the middle is the best place to be, and maybe Google will recognize this. This would do a LOT for online commerce, and the economy in general. Support bell curve relevance.
Cheers.
Re:Feedback Loops & Linking (Score:1)
Unfortunately, mindshare IS the key. You have to keep the product in front of people. Why do you think McDonalds still sends zillions on advertising? Everyone knows about them, there is one on every corner. Yet every week there is some new special, or new Happy Meal toy.
Because if they stopped advertising, they would quickly get rolled over by BK and Wendy's. 18 months, and they would be out of business.
For any company to survive, it needs to keep its name right out in front, everywhere possible.
Re:Feedback Loops & Linking (Score:2)
How often do you click a LINK to Amazon? Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of links to Amazon, but I would guess most of them NEVER get clicked. Why? Because there are too many of them.
The vast majority are book recommendations, via the affiliate program, usually related to the material of the linking site.
So, basically, there is an upper limit to the number of links before they essentially become useless.
The search engines currently evalute quality of a page based on the number of links, and the quality of the linking pages (and maybe some other calcs to check for fraud). Hardly what many people would call "useless". It's also a really good way to find tiny needles of valuable information among the giant haystack of approx 2e9 mostly mediocre web pages.
This is Google's essential flaw ... Google should instead group searches around a bell curve distribution, where the sites with the medium number of links have the highest relevance, with underlinked and overlinked sites falling off the ends.
In the vast majority of cases, Google's strategy works well. It's hard to argue with success, though it seems to come effortlessly in this post. Were you smoking something?
There are a lot of "howto" and FAQ style documents on the 'net, often times many copies of the same document, some older than others. Google really does have the magic of finding the short list of these documents that are the most up-to-date and relevant. How do you suppose that works??
Really, time is the only key. Oh, and having something useful or funny.
Now even if "time is the only key" (whatever that means), it follows from the rest of the message about as well as the typical ramblings of Jon Katz.
Well, that's enough inflamatory remarks for one day. I don't know what compelled me to reply to this silly message mod'd to "+4 Insightful" (yeah, right!)
Re:Feedback Loops & Linking (Score:2)
Travis
Re:Feedback Loops & Linking (Score:2)
Webcomics (Score:3, Informative)
There is a class of "second tier" comics which have nice little followerships: Little Gamers, Sexy Losers, Polymer City and Cool Cat Studio (really, any Keenspot comic that isn't Sinfest or EN) are among these. Everyone else, myself and my comic included, is "third tier", i.e., tumbleweeds rolling across their allotted server space.
Then there is Pokey, which stands conspicuously on its own. HOORAY.
Don't Forget Service (Score:1)
Some misunderstandings here (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, no that's not what it shows:
Quote from the research: "In fact, pure power law scaling appears to be the exception, rather than the rule." What the research shows is that "winner takes all" varies across the web between categories.
Also, the researchers have (I suspect) a mistaken view of "competition" and competitiveness. They rate the Amazon category of book-sellers as "more competitive" - when in fact it may be less competitive in economic terms, being dominated by one or two sites/sellers. Whereas the photography caregory may be "more competitive" because of a larger number of rivals of about the same size.
What they mean, I suspect, is that the publications/Amazon category has higher barriers to entry - the amount of adertising etc being a greater sunk cost, and likely to deter any aspiring internet book retailers. In purely economic terms, that makes the category less competitive. As an illustration, ask yourself if the operating system software market is more or less competitive because it is dominated by one large brand in Microsoft?
Re:Some misunderstandings here (Score:1)
Less competitive, unless you're Microsoft, in which case it's "the most competitive industry in the world".
Amazon pays for those links. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Amazon pays for those links. (Score:2, Informative)
A cost-per-click banner ad that only pays $0.05 per click would have cost Amazon $715.80. In this case, the cost is closer to $0.0027 per click. It's quite cheap advertising compared to almost anything else on the web currently.
Factor in the fact that affliates don't get referral fees for used items, auction items, and several other categories and you realize that their 5% referral is coming off their highest profit items. Any time a visitor buys a used item from Amazon, they don't have to ship anything, just collect a payment.
the IMDB is to movies as ______ is to books. (Score:1)
This sounds like Google (Score:1)
Astounding! (Score:1)
I never realized that...
A good tool to look at web linkage (Score:3, Informative)
It's a freebie download and you can get it here. [uiuc.edu]
[OT] http://modelingtheweb.com (Score:1)
Download a preprint in PostScript or PDF formats. Contact: Dr. David Pennock, dpennock@research.nj.nec.com, (609) 951 2715.
They bought a domain name specifically to publish (or help publish) the findings in their article. The site had 3 pages on it (depending on how you count) -- the home page, an example page, and links to the article itself in two different formats. In their article, they say "For more information, see http://modelingtheweb.com", so maybe they plan to publish more as time goes on, or add links to other folks modeling the web, or even host such articles directly
I wonder if this foreshadows a coming trend -- write an article, publish it in a print journal, and get a domain for it. Somehow this makes me sad. "We can't just publish an article and put it online, we have to get a top level domain for it." *sigh*
Re:[OT] http://modelingtheweb.com (Score:1)
*laugh* Yeah, I goofed.
Zipf (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch.h
An exerpt:
"Every so often scientists notice a rule or a regularity that makes no particular sense on its face but seems to hold true nonetheless. One such is a curiosity called Zipf's Law. George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English--"the"--appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities' sizes followed the same sort of pattern, which became known as a Zipf distribution. Oversimplifying a bit, if you rank cities by population, you find that City No. 10 will have roughly a tenth as many residents as City No. 1, City No. 100 a hundredth as many, and so forth. (Actually the relationship isn't quite that clean, but mathematically it is strong nonetheless.) Subsequent observers later noticed that this same Zipfian relationship between size and rank applies to many things: for instance, corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed."
It's one of the best articles I've read in a long time, demonstrating how they've managed to model not only extinct populations accurately (who knows how much after-the-fact tweaking went on, but...) but race riots and honesty in social groups.
Add to that, I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find it again, so someone had better read it. It's just under 10,000 words.
PS - I strongly doubt it'll get slashed, but if it does, here is the Google cached copy [216.239.51.100].
Re:Zipf (Score:1)
Well, in my defense, I didn't realize that it was posted on slashdot (for the life of me, I can't recall how it came to my attention), and it's not entirely obvious that the Zipf research is relevant here.
People need to lighten up about this karma thing. As proof of concept, I beg the next person who reads this with moderator points bean it. Really. Who cares? Just tryin' to be helpful.
'course, it would have been nice if I realized it was already on slash. Wouldn't have spent
People just don't know about their other options. (Score:2)
I think when people do a search for something in google, google should not only return links to webpages, but also links to directories on their site that contain other sites that are not very popular yet.
Re:People just don't know about their other option (Score:1)
More like winner takes MOST... (Score:1)
And how is this different from the RealWorld(tm)? Franchises do better than mom-n-pop both because of efficiencies of scale AND because national ad campaigns give them an edge. Trust of a new location is immediate, too. After a few years, being established gives one an additional edge. The only one of these that mom-n-pop can hope to win on is the last one.
If Barnes and Noble were to offer a better associate program, Amazon would lose associates. If someone cleverly merges the ideas of Napster and Ebay, or otherwise improves on Ebay's business model, the vocal segment of frustrated ebay vendors would leave, too.
This last part even makes sense. When I wander into a 'net community of experts on an unfamiliar topic (like when I decided to buy a film/slide scanner last month), they often suggest three or four vendors for specialty material. Why? Because Amazon doesn't carry the stuff, and neither will 2 of the 3 mentioned vendors. Experience simply tells them that when they get ready to buy, they call those numbers first.I know way too many niche vendors that have doubled their revenue by wisely using the internet. It isn't winner take everything, it's a matter of earning attention in a MUCH bigger market.
Amazon is simply the Wal-Mart of the internet (Score:1)
Certainly lots of sites link to Amazon. Amazon knows about more titles (and other merchandise) than any other single site, with the possible exception of Barnes & Noble [bn.com]. They've got LOTS more reader reviews than any other site including B&N. Their return policy is favorable to purchasers (that is, it's comparable to most brick and mortar bookstores). They frequently reduce shipping and offer coupons. What's not to like? Assertion of the one-click patent and their privacy policy changes (claiming they own the records of what you've purchased) are about it. Yeah, the privacy policy thing stinks, but even the brick and mortar stores track what you're buying. If you want privacy, pay cash.
Personally, if Bookpool [bookpool.com] has what I want in stock, I'll buy it from them. The prices are nearly always less than Amazon's. BUT, Bookpool only sells technical books, and nothing in the way of Christian theology (my other big reading interest). Barnes and Noble throws in free shipping with two or more books in an order, but the prices are usually higher.
People flock to Amazon because it's simply a valuable service.
The article doesn't match my experience. (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me that the article is nonsense. There are a lot of links to Amazon because Amazon is running a very active business in selling books.
CmdrTaco said recently that efficient search engines like Google [google.com] make the web flatter and more democratic. It has been my experience that this is true.
In search results, my book, What should be the Response to Violence? [futurepower.org] is often ranked just below stories from large news companies.
If you search for "books", you will find Amazon. If you search for something more specific, you may find a small, specialized bookstore.
The rich still get richer, but those who are not rich can now be heard.
Users still novices (Score:2)
I think most users are not yet sophisticated enough to easily find alternatives. Also, they *expect* large mass-market retailers instead of high-quality specialists -- that's how they've gone shopping most of their lives.
Once they gain the skill, and they learn to expect better than mass-market, they may turn to specialized online bookstores (from politicaleconomybooks.com to trashromancenovels.com to thinkgeekbooks.com).
For example, many users I support don't type addresses in the URL field. Most can't search efficiently ('how do you spell "google"?'), much less find sites that don't appear at the top of the search results.
They'll learn of course, and their kids are bloggers and already use the specialized sites. Then Amazon may find that they do everything, but nothing well.
What? (Score:1)
Time-to-live 0 hinders even using BarnesandNoble (Score:1)
accomodated their customers nearly as well.
1. time-to-live is 0 for many of Barnes and
Nobles' interactions.
That is, when you hit most of BarnesandNoble's
webpages, your DNS server is not supposed to
go to its cache, but go to BarnesandNoble's
DNS servers. As a result, almost
all BarnesandNoble webpages fail for me
since I use internet's 13 root name servers;
eg, A.root-servers.net
Using BarnesandNoble is impossible for me
unless I use DNS servers besides those that
are the foundations of internet.
Here are some time-to-live (ttl) for their sites,
barnesandnoble.com >0
www.barnseandnoble.com =0
store.barnesandnoble.com =0
shop.barnesandnoble.com =0
2. BarnesandNoble offers no used books.
The 1991 no-longer-printing book,
Passionate Attachment
by an President Johnson's advisor who
perpetually recommended ceasing involvement
in Vietnam,
George Ball
was essentially a book prevented from success
by political maneuvers.
While I couldn't buy this book at all at
BarnesandNoble, the listing at Amazon.com
included a used book listing on the main entry.
This contribution to the reading community by
Amazon helps greatly.
For this, Amazon has been attacked by the
publishing industry, yet Amazon knows its
primary customers are those who pay for books.
3. BarnesandNoble has no obvious listings of
suggested books in specialty areas.
But Amazon's listing for "Greene Econometrics"
has a few, mostly PhD students, listings of
"Great Books in Economics".
4. BarnesandNoble has no user reviews.
They have only the optimistic reviews of the
publisher.
Indeed, this seems a recurring theme of
BarnesandNoble to keep their publishers
in mind before their primary customers.
Amazon has kept its lead by helping its customers
make appropriate choices, without biasing the
customer towards someone else's wishes.
Amazon then succeeds when its competition
hinders its customers in numerous ways.
---Jameson C. Burt
Re:Time-to-live 0 hinders even using BarnesandNobl (Score:2)
PageRank is destroying the Web (Score:1)
Anything between these two extremes is a very slippery slope.
You can use this research to argue that the practice of ranking sites by counting incoming links, a practice that began only a few years ago, is fundamentally altering the nature of the Web.
This new Web is one of the reasons for the popularity of the weblogs -- it's the only way for the little guy to participate. It used to be that you felt like you were participating by putting up your own Web page. This is no longer true, because a new Web page from an average person no longer draws traffic. No traffic means no feedback, and no sense of participation.
More research like this will encourage search engines to discover algorithms that do less damage to the Web, one would hope.
The snowball effect (Score:1)
It's a snowball effect: a site becomes dominant, people become familiar with the brand, that makes them more likely to buy there, which makes it more dominant. What interests me in particular is that B&N's offline dominance apparently doesn't travel well.
Mark
Why I use Amazon (Score:1)
The comments are what really make the difference. There are many online stores that have customer ratings, but they are just stars and no comments, or very few, if any, customer reviews.
Comments are important in a review since it helps me, as a buyer, identify which reviews are valid. For example, if I see a customer give a book one star because it doesn't stoop down to the beginner level (which is many times the case) that review instantly becomes a 5 star in my mind and I'll probably buy the book.
Amazon has by far the most customer reviews and the most detailed customer reviews. I usually buy based on these reviews and have never been disappointed. That is the only reason I shop there more than other places.
link farms (Score:1)
would kinda defeat the link poularity thingy..
maybe search engines would have to actually look at content.
Not just institutional but also psychological (Score:1)
I believe there is also a deeply psychological phenomenon that is exacerbated by the anonymity of the web. Specifically, in the real world we can go into a shop and see the merchandise, look into the eyes of the staff, see the condition of the store, etc. These things foster an ability to trust both the product and the business because we've exprerienced it firsthand and have taken in clues as to the quality and trustworthiness of the products and the people. On the web, however, that function is limited to the professionalism of the interface and the name recognition/popularity/pervasiveness of the company.
Perhaps the answer for companies that aren't in the forefront on the web is to develop relationships with online communities that might be related to their products, make greater use of customer testimonials and provide better descriptions and actual quality photographs of merchandise.
One Month... (Score:2)
you're making this all too difficult (Score:1)
amazon is so popular because, unlike all other web sites, it's been designed by people who knew what they were doing. that's all there is to it, but it's amazing how difficult it is for people, including computer scientist, to grasp this very simple point.
Limited Attention Span (Score:1)
Not the Nets intention (Score:1)
The point was to give a massive distribution super power to anyone connected. And visa versa. Anyone could access you too! Tools were used to find specific things, and they worked well.
Then some jack-ass (I think his name was Bill something...) jumped up and exclaimed; "Hey! You should sell that software! Not give it away for free stupid!" and thus the current situation formed.
Commercial applications were born. Now children, we all know that the difference between a commercial thing and... something else...*..., is that the commercial thing could care less about giving you anything and is, in fact, designed to do exactly the opposite within the confines of the law.
Google is ment to "guide" you to commercial sites, most likely Google partners, not present information categorized in a logical and academic fashion. That would be giving it away for free, wouldn't it? What are you? A TERRORIST OR SOMETHING! HUH!?!?? HUH??? WELL??? *aims laser bomb*
;-D
Re:What's new? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's happened over and over again in the economy in the U.S. elsewhere. We're already seeing it happen again fairly rapidly in the U.S. (and probably other places) in a lot of service and utility businesses-- although some of that is a result of deregulation. Online business just speeds the process up.
The big benefit of the public Internet isn't the speed at which the rich get richer-- it's the speed at which something else can come along. The (relatively) low cost of having a presence online, and the speed with which one can establish a satisfying niche, is what made the Internet the "equalizer" in the late '90s. And everyone will still have a good shot at creating a niche and possibly overtaking this year's "big guns" on the Internet, unless a few organizations get enough power to control whether one "free" person can comunicate with other "free" people arbitrarily.