Rankmoron

Take a look at this atrocity of a site - Rankmon.

What on earth is it? It looks like a three listings of sites that have a search function, ranked by some completely arbitrary system (which are apparently not at all privy to), allowing us to determine things like "top organic search sites". Yahoo! and Google must be pretty disappointed at their placings of 4th and 8th, despite being specialists in organic search for the past decade. It must be degrading indeed to have put all this effort in, and still be ranked lower than Tripadvisor or eBay as an organic search engine.

However, I think their pain must pale in comparison to the top dog - Wikipedia, with their number one spot; what was it that guy from Wikipedia said? "... its readers regard Wikipedia as a search engine. It probably comes as no surprise that my spine stiffens at that concept ...".

Further, we have this spurious "growth" statistic. What on earth does it mean? No idea, it's not explained! Perhaps we gan guess by sorting the list by "growth" - ah no, the site operators were too lazy to code that. Or even run the thing through a spell checker, for that matter.

On pane two, "Fastest growing organic search sites in world", we have even greater delights. This is the part where we find out who's going to blow Google's search back into the 20th Century. Who's number 6 on the list?



Plumbingsupply.com! Who'd have thought it! Google, you better watch out. (Yes, I know it's for visibility, but just look at the page title..)

We can even dig deeper; try clicking on any of the sites you see, and you'll see where they rank for what keywords, and how important this is considered.

http://www.rankmon.com/site/index/dressupgirl.net

For example, dressupgirl.net's number 1 contributor to its high place on Rankmoron is "second for girls games in MSN Live". Wow, amazing! Second place! Looking down the list, we can see other lesser achievements. What's this one I see? "first for girl games in Google". Well, that's pretty good, but obviously not as good as being Second (oh yeah!) for such a popular, prestigious and market-share hogging engine as MSN Live Search. How on earth could you reach such an awful conclusion, and publish on the web? I hope this stuff's still in beta, or alpha, or being coded in notepad between classes..

Woah there, though. Maybe a went a bit far. I think I can see a potentially useful tool here - "Competitors"! Let's take a look, and see who else is competing for little girl's dress up games. Perhaps if we can nail these guys, dressupgirl.net can rocket all the way to number 1. On MSN. So who's there?

http://www.rankmon.com/site/competitors/dressupgirl.net

Oh man, they're screwed! Wikipedia, Amazon, About.com, Yahoo!, NeXTaG, eBay. I suppose none of those guys are dedicated sources to dressing up games, and certainly should be easy to knock out of the water. But wait just a god damned minute - haven't we seen this list before?

BS exhibit (a)

So, congrats Rankmon. Your algorithm sucks.