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It will be very, very, very hard for you to compete with google. If there is a problem, and it is more or less common, there are going to be message boards, IRC

by tx 19y ago

It will be very, very, very hard for you to compete with google. If there is a problem, and it is more or less common, there are going to be message boards, IRC logs and various blog entries talking about it. Google finds them all. You, on the other end, rely only on your own DB. Sounds like "one man vs army" kind of deal to me. Sorry. You asked what I think and this is it.

SwellJoe 19y ago
Google could be their best source of incoming traffic. The various answers sites seem to make a living that way.
- ericb 19y ago
  Agreed--google will likely provide a bunch of traffic. Also, google is not specialized to this niche. Here's an example from 3 weeks ago where google failed to provide answers that a centralized error lookup site might. Google had little that was relevant for the first several weeks this problem was out and only showed results for an ancient cause of a similar error message. Eventually it picked up a blog post, but 3 weeks is a long time. http://blog.ra66i.org/archives/informatics/2007/12/23/a-quick-gem-101-faq-gemrunner-name-error/ http://blog.ra66i.org/archives/informatics/2007/12/23/a-quic... Quote from the person who "fixed" the google bug with a popular blog post: There's a "problem" with the current version of rubygems that's causing somewhat of a FAQ, that as far as I can see, Google doesn't index too well...
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Yes, I Google for this kind of thing all the time...and quite frequently don't get good answers. I'm a rare bird, I guess, in the sense that I'm usually looking for answers about other people's systems, and so I'm dealing with hundreds of hardware, OS, version, etc. differences. Most folks only ever deal with a few such variants at any given time. Nonetheless, I can see this being a very useful service...not a terribly profitable one (at least in its early stages), but extremely useful. Assuming people use it, of course.

by tx 19y ago

SwellJoe 19y ago

Google could be their best source of incoming traffic. The various answers sites seem to make a living that way.

ericb 19y ago
Agreed--google will likely provide a bunch of traffic. Also, google is not specialized to this niche. Here's an example from 3 weeks ago where google failed to provide answers that a centralized error lookup site might. Google had little that was relevant for the first several weeks this problem was out and only showed results for an ancient cause of a similar error message. Eventually it picked up a blog post, but 3 weeks is a long time. http://blog.ra66i.org/archives/informatics/2007/12/23/a-quick-gem-101-faq-gemrunner-name-error/ http://blog.ra66i.org/archives/informatics/2007/12/23/a-quic... Quote from the person who "fixed" the google bug with a popular blog post: There's a "problem" with the current version of rubygems that's causing somewhat of a FAQ, that as far as I can see, Google doesn't index too well...
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Yes, I Google for this kind of thing all the time...and quite frequently don't get good answers. I'm a rare bird, I guess, in the sense that I'm usually looking for answers about other people's systems, and so I'm dealing with hundreds of hardware, OS, version, etc. differences. Most folks only ever deal with a few such variants at any given time. Nonetheless, I can see this being a very useful service...not a terribly profitable one (at least in its early stages), but extremely useful. Assuming people use it, of course.