Why domain names are more reliable than site descriptions, page titles and/or about pages

I’ve been spending the past couple days catching up on some of the backlog that built up in my RSS reader since Christmas… — actually I simply declared bankruptcy on some feeds that had accumulated hundreds if not thousands of posts in the interim.

I really don’t like following individuals — I prefer to follow topics. I appear to be the only one on the planet who makes that distinction and/or holds that preference. For me, it simply makes more sense to look at e.g. physics.org than it would to look at someone’s personal website… — unless I am actually interested in catching up on someone’s personal opinions, beliefs, philosophical points of view, etc.

One of the feeds I caught up on was Matt Mullenweg’s MA.TT feed, and a little over month ago he wrote a post about the “Fifth Estate“… and I disagree with the main gist of it. My disagreement is based on the simple fact that most of the retard media that people use to access information (e.g. Google and/or Facebook) do not magically connect things together as if this “technology” were some sore of genius machinery like an oracle or something like that.

Of course if I type “physics” into google.com, the top result (besides wikipedia.org, which is essentially a project funded by Google) is physics.org (again: the Wisdom of the Language is simply the most reliable measure of relevance), not some random blogger’s website. To say that millions of bloggers are all connected to each other is plain and simple hubris (sorry Matt — I usually agree with you on most stuff, but here you simply got it wrong IMHO ).

The reason why the domain name is more reliable is equally plain and simple: Someone is signing on the dotted line for it, and someone is also paying for it. The payment speaks louder than words: It makes us sit up straight and likewise also pay attention, much in the same way that paying an artist for their artwork is a form of recognition. It is a simple and straightforward fact: We recognize words.

Of course the word “physics” also appears on this page, but I am not so naive / illiterate to expect that I will therefore be connected to everyone who seeks information about physics. I could write the word 100 times and it wouldn’t make any difference: Search engines recognize that this is remediary.com, not physics.org — and therefore it’s simply about my personal opinion, and it is not about physics.

So while physics.org does appear on the results pages of most search engines when someone searches for “physics”, most of the other results are more or less random… and the shoddy results are of course intended to motivate the illiterate masses to click on advertisements instead.