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Despite being incredibly sick of always hearing about "the new google", and not believing it can happen due to the extremely high barrier to entry, I think there *IS* still opportunity for someone to gain significant share of the stagnating search marketplace.

The ONE major reason it could happen - is geek mindshare. That's where search was won by G. I read Rand and Matt's excellent piece of the digg algorithm, and it got me thinking about why I like the site so well. If the same processes, and level of expertise can migrate to other genres - they have a winner.

1. Simple, TRANSPARENT - yet effective algorithm

2. Kevin Rose an Owen Byrne won't sell out to Google (well - for less than a billion)

3. They just need an index - Y and G have both taught us it's about quality and not quantity

4. They have the mindshare from early adopters

5. Effective, scalable spam solutions (community moderation)

6. It's not hard to add topical categories

7. About 10,000 beta users away from creating the best index ever.

8. Strong ontology + decentralized user based quality control + (even a decent) index of pages + advanced search tools = kick ass search engine.

9. Digg *is* webmaster central

10. Relevance *is* the goal - and not a conflicting interest.

14 Tips to Kevin and Owen to Make Digg Better (go get 'em!)-

1. Develop a payment revenue share model for users

2. Weight users votes with topical expertise

3. DON'T Alienate your users - solicit feedback - and COMMUNICATE with top users - a forum (public or private) would probably be effective. RETAIN the goodwill you have - don't abuse it

4. Attract more celebrities and mainstream mindshare

5. Build an index (even if it's beta on a subdomain)

6. If you can't build an index - rent (borrow) one and lay your algo on it until you can.

7. Get some funding and build the infrastructure (it's still too damn slooooow)

8. Develop a better ad model to pay for those better beefier machines

9. Hire the equivalent of netscape anchors - but use a more creative pay model than starving wages for full time work.

10. Get Leo Laporte on board - that guy rocks.

11. Don't be afraid of beta stuff on subdomains (look at Google!)

12. Get your blog off blogspot - and never do anything like that again unless it's for reputation management or link pop

13. Hire Oilman and Greg for search advice

14. Improve your advanced search functionality

Anybody else got reasons Digg will or will not be the next 800lb. gorilla? Suggestions for improvement?

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Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl made his first horrible looking website full of animated .gifs in 1997, and after fours years of failure and experimentation ended up in the world of SEO and internet marketing in early 2001. He is currently an independent marketing consultant from the SEO school of thought. Todd earned a bachelors of business adminstration from Northwood University in 2003 while running an web design and consulting firm Meta4creations, LLC. Todd is a speaker at both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies conferences.