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What it looks like when Google links to your website
- olegp 13y agoWe've also had a lot of traffic to https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader as people look for Reader alternatives. Google should do this more often.
- fourstar 13y agoWhat 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.
- mechatronic 13y agoWhen 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.
- tobeportable 13y agoI felt good for them. They really need more recognition.
- raawmarkus 13y agoThanks to both of you!
- PavlovsCat 13y agoI agree, it couldn't have happened to a nicer site.
- aviraldg 13y ago<tangential> "...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>
- raawmarkus 13y agoI agree! It's a mess. We're based in Sweden so we do it this way.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoAgreed. Three decimal places is awfully high precision for a measurement of people.
- adPothier 13y agoThe metric system still fails to impose itself universally, so we can wait some time before the decimal mark is unified...
- kome 13y agoThe 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).
- fastball 13y agoThis 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.
- Amadou 13y agoThere 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.
- ekr 13y agoProbably 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$.
- proexploit 13y agoThere's no way $2000 even factored into Google's decision of who to link to.
- paranoiacblack 13y agoOr 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.
- babuskov 13y agoBoth 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.
- raawmarkus 13y agoI'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.
- MichaelApproved 13y agoI'd like to hear how they were able to handle the dramatic increase in traffic over such a short period of time.
- bnchrch 13y agoWith 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
- christiangenco 13y ago> 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 :)
- olaj 13y agoIt 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)
- imdhmd 13y agohey 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/ 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)
- computer 13y agoOne 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.
- raawmarkus 13y agoThanks, 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/ http://alternativeto.net/software/aol-reader/
- Raphmedia 13y agoKeep 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)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- joeblau 13y agoI 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.
- alainbryden 13y agoCongrats! 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!
- raawmarkus 13y agoThank you, that's so great to hear.
- ColinWright 13y agoNot sure you'll see this, but this is what your page looks like on my browser: http://www.livmathssoc.org.uk/images/AlternativeTo.png 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)
- raawmarkus 13y agoHi 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.
- ColinWright 13y agoIn 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.
- zmmmmm 13y agoI 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 ...
- seagreen 13y agoMarkus, what license is the content of AlternativeTo under? Have you considered one of the Creative Commons licenses like Stack Overflow?
- olaj 13y agoWe 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
- seagreen 13y agoSpam 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.