Diary of a Mad Editor

For years, Microsoft has been trying to come up with a viable alternative to Google’s famous search engine. The company’s latest attempt is a much-hyped "decision engine" called Bing. The question I had when I first saw the commercial for Bing was, is Bing a worthy alternative to Google?

I decided to test Bing against Google by running a few searches on both and comparing the two. Since I’ve been searching for an effective weight loss supplement to complement my diet and exercise regime, I decided to key in the keyword phrase "quick trim extreme burn reviews". In Google, you get your top search results, a few sponsored ad links in the sidebar and related keyword search links at the bottom of the page. With Bing, the first thing I notice is that more space is devoted to sponsored ad links than Google. On the plus side, when you mouse over the search results, you get a summary of the contents. It’s a nice idea in theory, because you can get a brief preview to help you decide whether or not to click on a link rather then just blindly visiting pages. In my first search I was actually impressed with Bing.

I decided to try another search and typed in my own name. In Google, the results were much more relevant than Bing and Google does a fair job of eliminating redundant results. Also, when viewing Bing’s summary, I noticed two flaws: The first is that when previewing content from places online where my writing had appeared, the summary displayed content that Microsoft doesn’t have permission to display (I’m not suggesting that I’m planning legal action or that I care that much given the circumstances, just making an observation). Second, in many, many cases the summary previews irrelevant page content from ads and other text that has nothing to do with the search parameters. In this search, Bing definitely shows some chinks in its shiny armor. Google is still Google. So, in my second search, I have to be honest and say it’s Google, hands down.

The biggest deviation in the quality of the two search engines came with my third test search. Since I’ve been so concerned of late with eBooks and eBook pricing, I typed in "eBook pricing" into Google and Bing. I was looking for links to information about the eBook pricing controversy — not links to places that sold eBooks. Unfortunately, the top results in Bing were mostly commercial sites selling eBooks and eBook readers. Google, however, seemed to magically know what I was looking for. The top results in Google took me to information about the eBook debate over pricing. Bing actually became more useless the more I used it.

Overall assessment: Google still does what it’s supposed to do. Bing looks nice but ultimately isn’t as useful as Google. Although, Bing seems like a marginal improvement over Microsoft’s previous search engine effort.

The other day, I was reading an article on some tech news website in which the author was lamenting the "inevitable" death of print magazines and the lack of quality control online (terribly ironic when one considers that he had written this article for an online publication). I am always suspect of an advocate of print publishing who makes a blanket statement about the poor editorial standards of online publishers. Not that there aren’t plenty of instances of lackadaisical editorial standards online (which we’ll get to shortly), but given that there are plenty of instances of lapses in both editing and fact-checking in offline publishing, it’s not at all fair to say that offline automatically equals quality and online automatically equals low quality. To prove his point, though, the author pointed to a well-known article farm. The term "article farm" is obviously a derogatory term. Simply put it’s a site that offers both free and custom-written articles about a variety of topics based on certain keywords. Like me, if you’ve been involved in online writing and publishing, you’ve probably written for these sites at some point and used some of these articles for your newsletters and websites.

Which brings me to a site called articlealley.com. Just this morning I was asked to review this site. It is, by definition, an article farm that employs many, many writers to produce both free and custom articles. There are a number of custom-writing packages offered ranging from $40 for a single article to $23 per article for bulk purchases. I couldn’t help think about the previously mentioned article while I browsed this site. Although this company promises high standards of quality control for it’s custom articles, I am assuming that the same writers creating this content are the same guys and gals writing the free articles available on the site. If so, let the buyer beware. Having read a number of the free articles on the site, I have to tell you that the quality control is non-existent. The information contained in the article is generic and unoriginal. Copyediting and proofreading are likewise non-existent. Many of the articles don’t even seem to be written by writers who speak and write English as a primary language. One such article, “Kanye West Lady Gaga A True Rock Performer” is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. That gives me pause.  Read that article and tell me honestly you’d pay Azeem to write for your website. Because if you are paying $40 for an article that you have to edit and rewrite yourself, you’d be better off  writing it yourself to begin with and saving your money.

I know of several of these so-called article farms that actually do demand a certain standard from their writers and do take some time with an article and demand rewrites prior to approving an article. Unfortunately, many don’t and that makes everyone who publishes online look bad. My hope is that articlealley.com has higher standards for its custom articles and will be more discerning in the future when it comes to their free articles. Because when it comes to generating traffic and ad revenues, quality is much more important to the equation than keyword density.

One of the most important skills for a writer to have is knowing how to do research. Library research. Internet Research. Etc.

You may find as a writer that you will, over the course of your career, be called upon to write on many different topics. Whether you are a freelance copywriter or a writer of crime novels, you will have to know stuff you do not know.

And no writer knows everything (although, I’ve met my share who think they know everything). Let’s face it: if "write what you know" literally meant write about what you already know, most of us wouldn’t have that much to write about. That’s where research comes into play. For example, I have no idea what spring plungers are. From the words alone, I surmise that it’s related to something mechanical, but I couldn’t tell you what one looked like or what it’s function is. I’m not a mechanically inclined person. As such, if I were to write something about spring plungers — either an article or some story in which the device played some small part, I’d have to learn about it. As a teenager, I didn’t really understand this. If you are a young writer just starting out, you need to understand this. Being a writer will require you to do copious amounts of research on many different topics, so if you’re not into doing that, you’re going to have to get into it. Write what you know — sure, but more importantly know what you write.