July 7, 2010
The first thing I do on launching new projects is checking out competition. Studying existing market is simply must to do. More important, it's always useful to find out what possible competitors have done, -- and do that better!
Obviously, I've started from comparing existing search engines. And guess what, the most popular one, - Google!, - has a special version that prefers uncluttered pages. Well, a sort of. That's the Google Accesible Search.
There are other incarnations of accessible search engines, like net-guide.co.uk. And at first glance, they are very similar to Mini-WWW:
"In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully -- pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off."
".. We pick the best results exactly as we do with regular Google search, and then re-order the top results by their level of accessibility ... Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more usable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter -- especially extraneous content ..."
However, such engines do not compete with Mini-WWW directly, and even their notion of Uncluttered Page is quite different.
The goal of Accessible Search is to provide a more useful experience for the blind and visually impaired. And that's a very specific world, with its own priorities and rules (e.g., the W3C's Web Content Access Guidelines), which differs significantly from those of Mini-WWW.
Unlike Mini-WWW, Google doesn't cut out inaccessible content completely. Rather, it slightly re-orders search results. For example, Flash pages are still there, but little lower. Besides, it relies mostly on automatic methods of scanning, which are rather superficial.
Mini-WWW prefers manual reviewing and indexing, and because of that, does not compete with Google. According to the article "Look at Your Competition. Now Be the Opposite", it may be for the better:
"The advantage to being the opposite is that the competition won't notice you and many times when they do they will laugh because you can't compete with them. They are worried about the people going head-to-head with them on features and pricing. They aren't worried about the new guy that likes to do things differently.
Sooner or later though they start to worry because when you don't compete with them on features or price and still take customers away from them how can they compete against you other than by copying you?"
Another group of competitors for Mini-WWW includes software products for removing Ads, e.g. add-ons for browsers. Or even complete unformatting, like the free Readability script. They are very popular (another proof that uncluttered niche has a huge demand). But cannot compete with the Mini-WWW.
The main problem with them is that big webpages MUST BE FULLY LOADED FIRST! (Which makes the whole thing practically useless). And only after that, the software removes some extra complexity. Needless to say, it works only for those users who have a good computer and network connectivity.
Another their drawback is that format for all resulting pages is the same. It's rather boring world!
More sadly, those technologies do not change the world. In particular, the Web. In fact, they do not change anything:
Millions extra bytes keep traveling back and forth on the Internet every time an oversized page is requested by browsers. Millions bytes for ads that people never asked to deliver! Thousands of thousands web servers behind it are busy with doing that wasteful job worldwide.
In contrast, Mini-WWW aims to promote a genuine end result from the beginning, - the lighter initial design!
To encourage webmasters to compete with each other on whose content is smaller and clearer. Because right now it seems they compete fiercely on whose website is bigger and clumsier ...