Talk:Finding Mac Software

From Mac Guides

Is the section on the Mac Orchard really necessary? It has a small directory and is not very popular; if we're going to include it, there are probably dozens of other sites that should also be included. Perhaps an "Other sites" section would be more appropriate with a list of minor software directories. --HexMonkey 22:17, 11 November 2005 (EST)

I agree. It doesn't deserve it's own section. Let's come up with a list of other places and make a generic category. Hell, add mine: http://www.the-alley.net/mark/mac --Mainstreetmark 00:27, 12 November 2005 (EST)

I've added an "Others" section which lists a few such sites. Feel free to add any you know that are at least as big/popular as the others listed. I don't think we should go any smaller than the Mac Orchard (in fact I'm still hesitant about leaving it there, it's magnitudes less popular than the others I added), as there are far too many small ones to list. --HexMonkey 02:36, 12 November 2005 (EST)

I would disagree about one thing.... The Mac Orchard is an immensely popular site for comparing Internet applications for the Mac (it's rather a "specialty store" as opposed to a supermarket), and it just underwent a major overhaul. And it's actually quite a large web site, with many hundreds of individual applications discussed and linked up! If there is some misunderstanding, please contact me at dsaur@macorchard.com --Drew D. Saur.

I'm sure it's very useful for what it's aimed to do, but it's just not in the same league as the other sites listed in the article. Try searching for each of them on Google, and you'll find that all the others have over a million results each, yet the Mac Orchard has less than 30,000. --HexMonkey 16:44, 20 December 2005 (EST)

I don't dispute the specialized nature of The Mac Orchard whatsoever, but "league" according to Google numbers doesn't quite work that way. If you look closely at the bottom of the first page of results for Sofotex and Softpedia, for instance, you'll see there is only one page of results for these sites (and while I don't deny Softpedia's popularity in the PC World, it's not a particuarly Mac-centric site, and Sofotex is practically a no-name in any circle. I hadn't even heard of it prior to today). At any rate, the large number of results for these two sites are largely duplicates (as stated at the bottom of the search results), which mostly fall within the sites themselves, since they contain so many pages. The Orchard has many, many pages of nonduplicative results of external sites that point to it. At any rate, I guess my point here is that Google's numbers alone don't tell the whole story when the sites themselves being searched contain thousands and thousands of pages. I do search engine consulting as a big part of my day job, so please excuse the digression.

But The Mac Orchard does not aim to compete with any of these sites anyway, so I think the point is moot....moving on, my main point is that the use of the word "small" in the description of the Orchard is misleading. For what it is, it's overwhelmingly exhaustive. I suggest thinking about changing the word "small" to "specialized," (or "500+" if an indicator of size is something you feel is relevant) and getting rid of the mention regarding "links" as well, because that hasn't been the focus of the Orchard for the last 9 years.

All this said, I do appreciate the consideration you are giving this, and I hope this clears some things up.

Drew

While I agree that Google results alone is not a good measure, it is not entirely useless either. There is not a 100% relationship between results and website popularity, but there is some correlation (eg people are more likely to link to popular sites), so a site with, in this case, over 20 times as many results is likely to be far more popular. Even though I agree with most of your arguments, the Google results don't support your claim that The Mac Orchard is an "immensely popular site" since the other sites have results several orders of magnitude larger.

I note your point that SofoTex and Softpedia only have about 30-40 each when omitted results aren't included, but I highly doubt that a website with only 30 external pages linking to it would have over a million pages (to make the difference in search results). I suspect (although I could be wrong), that Google takes a list of the top 1000 results for a search (it does not display more than 1000 results per search) then omits articles from the same site, and if it did it in the other order (omitting articles, then trimming to 1000 results) you would see a very different scenario. As some supporting evidence, this article didn't appear in the search results for "SofoTex", yet it does if you search for "SofoTex Mac Guides". You also mention that you haven't heard of SofoTex before, but conversely I hadn't heard of The Mac Orchard before it was added to this article (and I had heard of SofoTex).

I've removed the mention of "links" from the description as you requested, but I think "small" is valid. While it is not a small directory by any means, it is small relative to the other sites listed. Personally, I don't think The Mac Orchard should be in the article at all, but left it there as a compromise. As I said at the top of this page, there are dozens of other directories of similar size to yours, and it would not make sense to list them all.

--HexMonkey 20:34, 20 December 2005 (EST)