Search Activation Thoughts
This morning at around 07:30 we received a call telling us that our site (this very site) was not showing up on the "5 major search platforms".
This site, lists:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Yandex
as the 5 that are the "major search engines".
Not a bad list really. Google very much is the number one search engine, Bing almost certainly is number 2 (thanks to Microsoft to my knowledge still being the number one operating system on desktop computers).
The information presented is a little unsual, because it doesn't seem to use the exact same criteria, but that's tollerable... But they were talking (in theory) about "voice search"...
I'm not sure I can really test that out. I can search "Siri" the Apple on two different devices (not sure if they provide different results, but let's look at the results from those search platforms listed there:
Google gives results that should get you to my site fairly quickly,
(except that I have some configuration issues at the time of testing, for
some URLs that should be directing to the home page
http://www.datsemultimedia.com/, is not redirecting but rather giving a
404 Not Found error.
Bing
Nothing directly pointing to the site, but everything is either stuff that is stuff I have elsewhere, or stuff that some site has scraped which seems to be more or less legitimate.
Yahoo
It has fewer rubbish (ie. not at all what was searched for) results than Google, but fewer legitimate results than Bing.
Baidu
This isn't really useful for me. My Chinese reading is poor, but it tries it interestingly has an invalid link to my PeerTube instance. It is my PeerTube instance, but it's essentially linking to it directly rather than through the registered domain name. I could fix that, but it would be, kind of "suspect" to have a certificate that refers to my hosting provider.
That said, a different approach would be to have it redirect from that to my site. That would be the "proper" approach.
Yandex
Some different results. Stuff that's unexpected. Looks to be "me" but places I'm entirely unfamiliar with.
Is this bad?
Is it bad that I'm not showing up through any of these things? Well, it's not exactly great. If I was actively looking to have people come to the website this would be very bad. The fact that people can find it, if they put in the effort when searching... That's not terrible.
Now I am not really looking for people to find the site, the main reason that it exists at all, is because of these calls about it "not showing up in search..."
Their claim ast to why they call
They state that when anyone searches, they will get a notification to call. The company involved is not associated with any of the search engines in question as far as I can tell. And certainly not with, "all of them."
This is not data that the search engines are likely to share. It would be as close to a "trade secret" as you're likely to get. It's not that there isn't ways to see how much something is searched for, but you will not be getting anything approaching "real time" reports of a search, unless you are the search engine itself.
Are these calls legitimate?
Absolutely not. These are flat out telemarketting calls, they refuse to answer questions they are required to. They may give "an answer," but when I have tested the answer they offer... The answers they provide do not serve the purpose required.
They must give both a postal address, and a free to call phone number.
Free to call phone number may be a local number, if it's considered to be local to who they are calling. Which for someone in a big city, would be not too difficult, but for me, the population area that would be considered to be a local call is almost certainly under 20,000 (about 15,000 I think, but I haven't checked what that area is in a while, or the specific reported population).
What can you do?
Basically nothing. You don't have to take the calls. You can try to report the calls, but if any action does occur, it's likely after the specific company has moved on.
You can treat them poorly, they aren't unknown to do that themselves (some of the things they have said to me are absolutely terrible), but it really doesn't effect anything at all.
You can try to, "waste their time," and that seems a thing some people will recommend, but it really isn't all that effective.
You might be able to block them, or at least try. If you can block based on some kind of block list, that is properly maintained, that can work, but unless you trust that what your phone company does, the options for that can be quite limited.
My approach has largely been to not answer questions, but ask them questons. I know that they're not legitimate. I also know that even if they are legitimate, there's almost no chance that I would be suficiently interested in what they offer to actually pay for it.
I'd almost say the best approach is just not answer the phone, but that's easier when seeing if the call is "worth answering" is fairly low effort.
I personally usually have to get up, and go to the phone before I know anything about what an incoming call is. In theory I could set something like Asterisk up.
I'm not sure if that would serve our purposes, at least as things currently stand. I believe to do so, I would require some significant hardware to make it work.
I say, there's little you can do to make the calls go away. Anyone who claims that one approach can accomplish that, is either mistaken, or being dishonest. Just because someone recomends something known to not work, does not mean that they know that. Though you have to wonder.