TasteKid’s Journey

I just want to say I haven’t been as lazy as the frequency of my blog posts would suggest. I’ve been working on improving Emmy’s recommendations and enlarging her knowledge base. If everything goes well, the next version of Emmy’s index will be available in several weeks. I have also been tackling some other issues regarding this project, but I won’t go in too many details right now. All I can say for now is expect an improving service and keep exploring your taste.

Searching for TasteKid on Google no longer triggers a “Did you mean: Taste Kid” message (with the blank space between “taste” and “kid”).

A couple of days ago, an article featuring TasteKid made it up to Digg’s main page. This triggered an “emergency landing” on Delicious’s main page, too. Around the same time, this happen. Then this. Then, others followed.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve started doing some changes on Emmy’s learning processes. What am I trying to do is basically increasing Emmy’s knowledge base and providing better quality recommendations.

This new redesigned engine is currently in testing, and it will take some time until its knowledge will be used on the public version of TasteKid. If everything goes well, I expect this to happen in about a month or so.

I will describe in further depth these updates when that time will come. Until then, Emmy continues to improve herself using the existing engine. Some of the time constrains are related to the limitations of the available hardware, so I think I will open myself a little bit more to sponsorship opportunities in the near future.

About a week ago I’ve started experimenting with Google AdSense and the Amazon Affiliate program. Today the experiment ends, and I have decided to turn off, at least for now, both programs.

TasteKid is an unusual website from Google’s point of view. The AdSense targeting algorithms focus on analyzing the content of the page on which the ads are delivered, but TasteKid’s content is just a list of seemingly random internal links (the suggested items). Despite this, Google has managed to provide related ads in some cases (e.g.: concert tickets for one of the suggested bands), but, unfortunately, many times it fails to come up with relevant ads. This is hardly Google’s fault, as it only tries to match TasteKid’s content with items from its pool of ads, and not so many advertisers set as keywords for their ads band names or movie titles.

The consequence of non-relevant ads being displayed is a very low click through rate, that not only reflects negatively on AdSense earning, but also suggests that users are not interested in these ads. This furthermore has a negative impact on user experience, like any other element on a web page that is displayed despite the fact the user is not interested in it. In conclusion, I have decided that, at least for now, TasteKid is better off AdSense.

As for the Amazon Affiliate program, things are a little bit different. The ads were presented within the tooltip (the one that appears for each resource) and the advertised product was a direct result of the parameters sent to Amazon (i.e. band name or movie title). This meant that, for known resources (and the resources for which the ads triggered were quite popular, because I was displaying them only for resources on which Emmy has a Wikipedia description), the relevancy of the advertised product was pretty good. Even so, few users seemed interested in following these ads. The reason for this is that it’s quite unlikely for somebody to rush and actually buy through Amazon a whole album of a band that they’ve just discovered – they would probably first try to learn more about the band, or listen to more songs performed by that particular band that may be freely available on the web. As for movies, I think this option is actually quite useful, but, despite this, the overall usefulness of this whole Amazon Affiliate program isn’t very clear to me just yet. I have decided to stop this program together with Google AdSense for now.

Nevertheless, this was an interesting experience for me, that I will probably use in the future, when I will be more preoccupied on monetizing TasteKid’s traffic while maintaining a pleasant user experience.

I have decided to play around with Google AdSense and the Amazon affiliate program. While TasteKid is still too young to gather relevant revenues by using these programs, I think that a little experimentation can prove a valuable experience.

I have placed the Google AdSense text advertisements (that I hope will become more relevant in the next hours) beneath TasteKid’s answers, in a way that I hope interferes the least with a pleasurable user experience. Also, the ads only show when the user searches for something that TasteKid knows about, and is able to provide quality suggestions (they don’t show up on the main page or on pages with few or no recommendations).

The Amazon affiliate program allowed me to place relevant Amazon products (music albums, movie DVDs) inside the tooltip that appears and provides additional information when the user hovers the “?” icon near each resource. The products appear only for bands and movies that have a description, thus allowing the user to pursue such a product only after informing on TasteKid about that particular artist or movie.

If you feel that these new elements affect the quality of your experience with TasteKid, please let me know.

Today, TasteKid won third prize at Webstock Awards 2008, a Romanian Web 2.0 contest, within the “Utility” category. Thank you Cristian Manafu for suggesting me to participate in this contest. It was a pleasent experience :)

Taste Kid has been included in The Search Race. Every single pick is higly appreciated :)

In terms of usual website content, the one that Google appreciates, Taste Kid is a disaster. Not only it has tens of thousands of pages that all look alike, but the content of these pages are nothing more than a list of internal links (the suggested items). I can’t blame Google if it finds that suspicious, as I’m sure that its bots find it hard to determine the value of these pages. One of my biggest fears was that Google will permanently consider Taste Kid as a sort of link farm, trying to gain page rank by having lots of pages that link randomly to each other (yes, I do think that a page never has a page rank value of 0, and, to a certain extent, having many pages that link to one another will increase your overall page rank, but that’s another discussion).

Luckily for me, Google hasn’t been that drastic. Despite the lack of classic original content, it constantly crawls and indexes Taste Kid’s pages. I suppose, after all, the very enumeration of resources (bands, movies, books), that is unique for every page, can be seen as a type of original content, and I’m glad Google perceives it that way. I just hope it won’t change its opinion one day.

Well, actually it wasn’t all that official, but on the 21st of January 2008 I finally got the tastekid.com domain up and running and uploaded the new version (with the new design) of TasteKid. And that was pretty much it.

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 10th, 2008.