[Clipart] Introduction to the Open Clip Art Library

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> I fully expect us to become the number one hit for clipart soon
> enough.

Number one?  At the moment, I'd be happy if we just got on the first
*page* of Google results, for any of the following searches:

clipart (currently we are 25th, i.e., third page)
clip art (currently we are 23rd, i.e., third page)
clip-art (currently we ar 24th, i.e., third page)
"clip art" (currently we are 19th, i.e., second page)

We *are* moving up, though; early in the year we were fourth-page or
worse for all of those, which for most practical purposes is the same
as not being listed.

We're not ready to be the I'm Feeling Lucky result yet; we need to get
some of these bugs ironed out before that happens, or else we'll be
inundated with questions about them ;-)

We did recently make the first page for vector clip art, for whatever
that's worth (although for "vector clip art" as a phrase we are not
even in the first four pages).  Somehow I suspect the word vector
doesn't make it into most searches for clipart content, but hey, we'll
take what we can get, right?

Even better, we are fourth for public domain clip art and sixth for
public domain clipart.

We are, not surprisingly, number one for open clip art library, but
people will only find us that way if they already know we exist.  

We also are third for svg clipart and both first and second (via our
own domain name and the freedesktop.org domain name, respectively) for
svg clip art, so if people are specifically looking for clipart in SVG
format, they can find us.  At this time, that's a pretty narrow
audience, though.  Then again, it's a good core demographic for us,
because people who are already aware of SVG and looking for it are
particularly likely to contribute and/or become active.

I take the trouble to note all of these statistics mainly so that the
numbers will be in the mailing list archive, for the express purpose
of allowing us to compare at some point in the future (say, six months
from now) and see how things have shifted.  I have thought about
trying to do a little optimization (e.g., arranging things so that a
lot of our pagerank aggregates on the home page and only a little
leakes out offsite), but I concluded that it is not necessary, because
if our content is compelling, other sites will link to us and we will
eventually have all the pagerank we need.  If you do the Google
searches listed above, you find that many of the results are inferior
in one way or another to our collection; if our collection continues
to improve, we will eventually rise past most of them.  Search results
only very occasionally change suddenly; usually the shift is gradual,
but it does catch on -- the search engines are *designed* to get the
most compelling results to the top of the list.  So we should focus on
making the collection and the site compelling and useful, and let
Google worry about how to get their algorithm to list us first :-)

-- 
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