Unless you speak Korean- probably not. But for those of you who think Google will never meet its match, pay attention. In Korea Naver has Google beat- and it’s winning by throwing a new variable into the search mix- user input.
The same way Wikipedia counts on it’s users to create content- Naver asks it’s users to answer questions- the reward – being ranked from ordinary to supernatural- and if you really know it all- you can be one of 22 “Gods.”
While Google uses some feedback from search selections to evaluate and provide page rank- it doesn’t go as far as to ask outright for the answers. Heuristic learning for search is probably the next big thing- if it isn’t already partially here now. For those of you who don’t know what heuristic is: an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student.
In other words- you learn from trial and error until you get it right.
This probably isn’t applicable to how to get your site to the top of search just yet- but, the fact remains that if you provide the right answer- or the right links to the right answer- your site will be the last place the visitors stop- making you the expert for the minute- and maybe turn the visitor into a customer.

A week or so ago I posted about blogs disappearing.

Last night, the anonymous local political blog, mydayton.blogspot.com did a vanishing act- not just from the site- but from Google and its cache.

While blogs are so much easier to update and add content to, they are also somewhat dangerous from a backup standpoint. The new version of WordPress has a backup utility built into it- but, I’m pretty sure that most people don’t back up their site onto a local computer or save their posts.
That’s probably not what happened to mydayton.blogspot.com which had some questionable material and may have been deleted because of a terms of service issue, but the point should be made to back up your site including the database daily.
Our hosting solution backs up nightly- but, if you let more than 24 hours go by we too could lose your site.
I’m not sorry to see mydayton.blogspot.com go- I’m not a big fan of anonymous political speech- I believe in signing your name to things- but, this is a good lesson to be learned for those entering the blogosphere- if you don’t own your hosting and url- someone else does. Before you put a blog up on blogger.com (blogspot.com) or wordpress.com, think about who you want having control of your material.

And as a last note- If you were looking for mydayton.blogspot.com and found this post- this is the power of WordPress and search engines. I highly recommend you look into taking the blogosopher seminar so you can learn how to do this right.

note: the site may resurface at mydayton.org or mydayton.net

both are listed with the same contact through whois (click on the site names for the registration info)