Search Tips for Chinese Porcelain

I've certainly neglected my site for a while now. I realized that I hadn't added any pieces for quite some time. That's when I decided to share the latest addition, the government dish. I've had it for well over 20 years. I actually have about 30 or more pieces packed away that I may pull out someday for viewing. I have also added a search engine to my site as well. In doing so, I stumbled onto something that I thought might also make a good addition to the site, but in the way of information.

The fact you are here, at my site, says you probably used a search engine to find me. I also enjoy searching the net, seeing other collections and enjoying some of the research available. But I've started to notice something that is actually clogging the search results. I've started to see a surge of Wikipedia articles. They are cluttering the net. At present, they boast to having over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing. Searching for their name alone returns over 233 million hits. I did a little investigating and think I have some suggestions to help you wade through it all, regardless of which search engine you use.

I did some searches for the two words Chinese Porcelain using some of the top search engines just to see where my site fell in the ranking. Then I did the same search, but avoided Wikipedia articles by preceding it with a minus (-) as shown in red below. Keep in mind that the search engines are constantly changing / improving their search methods, so what you see below may differ from time to time.

			(earlyming.com)
Search Engine	Search Term	Hits	Rank	Results
	Chinese Porcelain	25.8 million	7
	Chinese Porcelain -wikipedia	25.4 million	4	Eliminated 400 thousand
	Chinese Porcelain	702 thousand	2
	Chinese Porcelain -wikipedia	587 thousand	2	Eliminated 115 thousand
	Chinese Porcelain	3.93 million	4
	Chinese Porcelain -wikipedia	3.80 million	3	Eliminated 130 thousand
	Chinese Porcelain	26.2 million	5
	Chinese Porcelain -wikipedia	25.8 million	3	Eliminated 400 thousand

(data gathered Apri11st, 2008)

Though my own ranking wasn't effected that much, when it was effected, it was displaced (bumped back) by Wikipedia articles. Since Wikipedia has exploded on the net, their practice of linking to their own articles within their domain has effectively cluttered the net causing false ranking results with the search engines. Users looking for collections to enjoy, have to instead wade through a multitude of Wikipedia articles. Unless you are specifically looking for that type of information, my suggestion is to use a minus (-) immediately preceding Wikipedia (as shown above) to avoid the clutter. Just to experiment, I did a search looking for the words Chinese Porcelain at the Wikipedia site (.org). On the page that came up, I counted 237 word links and 46 image links back to themselves. All these pages patting themselves on the back as they clutter the internet with a kind of pseudo popularity they've created within their own domain.

Wikipedia does have some good information, but with the information being created and/or edited by the users, it can also be unreliable. There are many site discussions and blogs addressing this issue. Some of the search engines blocked Wikipedia for a while, but it's now back. How the search engines operate in different countries seems to vary. I've done out-of-country searches and the results always differ from country to country.

Since this is a search-tips page, I'll toss in some other things I've noticed in checking things out. Hopefully they also will help you in finding what you are looking for. Most I'm sure you're aware of.

Of course the major search engines like Google and Yahoo have to make money through ads and paid sponsorship, it's only fair. And they usually do so in a noticeable and forthright manner such as advertisements and/or sponsored links aligned along the right or left column of the search results screen. Other search engines will list several sponsored sites at the beginning of the results page, and they are usually identified as being sponsored, often against a very light blue background. But the smaller, less popular search engines are doing something that I feel is a little deceptive in displaying their results. First off, many just use the major search engines to gather their results, and instead of listing just a few (3 or 4) sponsored sites at the top of the page, they instead scatter them within the valid results. One example is a search I did for Chinese Porcelain using Excite. I was surprised to see only 62 sites found, and also surprised that my ranking was 15. Did a cut and paste below.

It turns out that 14 of the 20 results given were sponsored (as noted on the last #19) along with a few of our favorite Wikipedia links. Ranked 11 on the list was eBay as a sponsored site. And I also notice there is no light colored background to distinguish between valid and sponsored sites. See what money can buy? Doing the same search one minute later will show a completely different picture as they shuffle in an entirely new set of paid sponsored links with the few valid links moving up or down just a few slots.

Of those smaller search engines still using a colored background to distinguish between valid and sponsored links, the color seems to be getting lighter and lighter. Below shows an example.

If you look very closely at the background color of the text in this sentence,
you will see it is against a very light blue background.

And looking closely at this next sentence, you will notice it's now against a
white background. The light blue signifies a sponsored link.

Unless you have a sharp eye and catch this, you are instead tricked into
visiting a site that has paid for sponsorship. Keep an eye out for this.

Even more deceptive, from the
folks at is the following.

If the above wasn't hard enough to detect, this one definitely is. Here they
chose the color #F7FAFF to lighten even more.

There seems to be a thin line as to what is fraud and what isn't on the
Internet. That thin line seems to have a color as well.

In this example, the color is red-247, green-250, blue-255 with a hue
of 134, saturation of 255, and light of 251. Pretty sneaky.

I've also noticed that the text notifying the viewer that the following sites are sponsored is getting smaller and lighter, perhaps soon it will disappear. I just now cut and pasted one for you below.

Good luck,

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