Texture design

Posted by randfish

After 5 days in China, I'm completely unqualified to give any advice on the country, tourism, travel or search marketing, but I think that despite that, it's still worthwhile to give my early impressions. Bullet points are a must, given the average of 5-6 hours a night of sleep, numerous blisters and a dead-tired roommate

• China is accessible - before coming to China, I had a lot of questions, and plenty of fears. Can you drink the water? (no) Are the hotels accomodating of English? (absolutely) Are the streets safe? (completely) Is it affordable? (for the most part). Today, a lot of those questions are answered, and I'd feel as comfortable traveling to most parts of China as I would visiting most parts of Europe. It's certainly not the same, but from a global traveler's perspective, it's as accessible as any major city in the western world.
• The Chinese people are as unique and varied as anyone else - stereotypes about "Chinese" abound, and they're almost all as completely inaccurate as stereotypes about Americans, Canadians, Mexicans or Indians. People here are like people everywhere - unique, not definable with simple adjectives, individual. There may be traits that are more popular here than elsewhere (slightly less friendly to strangers, often more friendly to friends, entrepreneurial, and much taller on average than you might first guess).
• Internet Adoption is Rampant - in the back room of tiny restaurants and washing machine repair shops in the poor neighborhoods of Xi'an, you'll find an old computer and a young person surfing the web. Internet cafes are wildly popular in every neighborhood I've seen them in, and everyone in Beijing has a cellphone with web access (at least, that's the way it seems).
• Political Discourse is Open - The myth that Chinese people are ignorant of their political climate or that of the world around them is totally false (at least, those we've met in big cities, and even in little shops on the outskirts). Like Americans or Mexicans or South Africans, they freely discuss the imperfections in their government and policies and how they think it should be made better. There's no misconceptions, either, about the news you get from official sources vs. what's actually happening - much as with US news, the educated folks here recognize that you don't get the full story in the papers. The censorship of certain websites, search results, etc. seems almost useless - no one I've talked with is unaware of, for example, disputes on exports and trade deficits, the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the history of conquering Tibet or the many mistakes made during the cultural revolution (1966-76). It may not be as "free" and "open" as some western societies, but at least in big cities, or anywhere a tourist might find themselves (tiny towns near the Great Wall or the Terra Cotta warriors), knowledge is far more abundant than westerners presume.

┬?Some of the things you hear about China that absolutely are not myths, however, include:

• A Big Population - There are no words to describe the size of a city like Beijing, and from what I'm told, almost no city on the planet rivals Shanghai. In the densest provinces, you cannot find a speck of unsettled land. In Sichuan, we've heard that you can drive from one end to the other, and never see an acre undeveloped.
• A Red Hot Economy - Three business cards per person is not uncommon, and neither are three jobs. Opportunity is everywhere and the myth of disrespect for foreign goods is completely unfounded - the Chinese, from all evidence, love western brands and goods and are as happy (if not happier) to consume these as home-grown items.
• Pollution - the air quality is generally terrible, save for just after a heavy wind or rain. In Xi'an and Beijing both, even on the outskirts (with the exception of this morning's trek to a section of the Great Wall), it's rough going. I've noticed that despite days and days in the hot sun, my skin has barely taken a tan, never mind burned. Comparable exposure in Seattle would leave me fairly crispy, and from what I hear, this is because of the thick, smoky haze that constantly hangs over us.

I know that in a week's time, I'll have much, much more to share, including a considerably better understanding of the China search marketing environment. Please do share your own knowledge of China below - I'm certain that many of our Chinese readers will have a much better idea than I about the truth of my early impressions above.

p.s. If you're going to be in Shanghai tomorrow night (Tuesday)┬?or the next (Wednesday) and want to meet up for dinner, shoot me an email

Posted by randfish

Years ago, the world of Design was filled with mystery and intrigue - vague half-answers from the engines combined with private forum and backroom conspiracies to make for an industry rife with misinformation. Today, those problems still exist in some forms, but the engines are far more forthright and the mysteries of the ranking algorithms are no longer shrouded in dubious half-truths. Sure, we may not know everything in them, and we may not have the right balance, but by and large, search marketers can read through a document like the search ranking factors and feel fairly confident in their wisdom (if not, neccessarily, their abilities). As the old joke goes - "I stole the Design algo!" "What does it say?" "We need links!"

However, all that aside, there are still plenty of straightforward, honest answers to questions, both simple and complex, we'd all love to get from the engines. I'll share a few of mine, and hopefully you can fill in lots of your own in the comments. If we're lucky, one day in the future, these may all have answers.

A few of my questions (in no particular order):

1. Does a link from a page with meta robots="noindex, follow" carry less weight? no weight?┬?
2. What role do search quality raters play┬?in determining rankings?
3. Does your engine ever use the predictive abilities of search keyword demands to profit outside the world of search?
4. Some domains move effortlessly to new domain names without a loss in rankings, while the vast majority go into the "sandbox" to languish for many weeks or months - what are the factors affecting the decisions to "trust" some domain moves while "distrusting" others?
5. How much impact do the other domains owned by / registered by a site owner have on the way a site is viewed/treated algorithmically?
6. What is the purpose/motivation behind obsfucating accurate, precise┬?keyword usage data? (why not simply charge for it?)
7. What is the purpose/motivation behind obsfucating accurate, precise link data? (why not simply charge for it?)
8. Do better webmaster relations have a direct,┬?positive impact on earnings?
9. Why don't you (mostly Design, Ask and, to a lesser degree Design) refrain from building/owning content portals that could deliver traffic and revenue?
10. Design - is your share price overvalued?
11. Do companies/sites that spend a lot with your engine receive any Design benefits (free consulting time, a few tricks from an engineer, etc)?
12. Do you use any of the following - latent semantic indexing, keyword density, term vectors, term weighting?
13. How do you detect cloaking? No, really?
14. In less than 100 words, describe why you choose to rank Wikipedia above accurate sources?

If I were Matt Cutts or Tim Mayer or Eytan Seidman or Kaushal Kurapati... I would probably answer - 1, 5, 7, 8 and 9. Seriously, though, I'd really love to get your questions below. Next time I sit down with these guys, I'll put their feet to the fire (or, in my case, a slightly warm pebble).

p.s. I promise - lots of fantastic stuff on China to come ASAP. And if anyone from Design China in Beijing is reading, please drop me a line (rand_at_Designmoz.org)┬?- we'd love to see you while we're here

Today of Webmaster Radio Jim Hedger and I discussed (for the entire show) the topic of Net Neutrality and why we need to keep equal access to the Internet available for all. We interviewed Timothy Carr, Campaign Director for SaveTheInternet.com. Tim helped us cover why Net Neutrality is an important issue and he provides us all with methods to be heard and make sure the Telcos don't have their way. Following Tim was Senator Dorgan who introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act' into congress.

It was likely our best show to date and covers an extremely important topic. Anyone with a website should give it a listen and then get their voices heard. You can download the show on the Webmaster Radio site here.<

Posted by randfish

Beware Designmoz readers. This is not your typical blog entry from Rand. It contains not only foul language, but a glorification of those parts of the search and online world that I shy away from. It's not for the delicate of heart, but I figure my writing style could use a bit of a shakeup, and what the heck, it's midnight Friday in Beijing, what better time to author something scandalous?

Today I want to tell you a bit about the men and women who make up the sordid, no-holds-barred, downright sexy side of the search industry. They're not much like me at all. In fact, while I'm a literal Momma's boy (with my ethics constantly in the way of a bigger wallet), they're wallowing 6 feet deep in sin and loving every minute of it, especially the greenbacks. The thing is, no matter how dark and ugly their online practices get, these heroes of spam, the decent ones, the ones I respect, are the best kind of people a guy like me could want to know. It is with no irony that I say that you could not ask for a better “posse” when the going gets rough, in the online world, or the real one. They'll bully you into a private party, pay for drinks and meals you could never afford and beat the shit, literally or electronically, out of anyone who gives you a sideways glance. They're one of my favorite things about working in this business.

Who are “they”? They're online hustlers. Gods and Goddesses whose powers stem not from some ritual sacrifice of pig genitalia on a pentagram (although who knows, I don't spend every hour of the day with them), but instead from their downright legendary knowledge of all things “web,” especially how to exploit it for profits. I'm talking about soul-wrenchingly powerful domainers, arbitrage-overlords, kings of link spam and temporary rankings and web entrepreneurs who know how to source, price, market and sell online the kinds of goods and services that devil would give his right arm for. Yeah – a lot of them are in PPC (no, not that one, the good kind), Porn, Pills and Casinos. And there's plenty who would give a mafioso a run for his money when it comes to who's “seen it all.”

I'm not advocating these industries – I'm certainly not cut out for it myself. But I am giving respect where it's due – to people smarter, wilier, tougher and more morally flexible than I am.

No amount of raunchy expletives or conniving descriptors are going to do my friends justice, though. I'm going to have to give some examples. In these, however, the names, industries and a few facts have been changed to protect the very fucking guilty.

My friend “Nora” is near the top of the gambling industry food chain. She used to eat GoldenPalace's PR bullshit stunts for lunch and crap out nails 10 minutes later. Listening to her isn't just fun. It's inspiring. One story I loved started with a load of domains she had been running around a specific gambling topic – let's say “no limit blackjack.” Most of these domains had rankings at Design! & Design, and while several had been banned from Design, the rest were still pulling in big cash from the market leader. Anyway, she gets a tip that some of the linking practices she's been using – namely URL injection – are going the way of the dodo. She's a smart girl, so she decides to re-invest; she starts selling the domains one by one on different private marketplaces online (and through offline channels as well). She tells a brilliant fictional tale to each buyer to explain the quick-sell (particularly to some bigger outfits who've been hounding her for a sale or at least a switch to their affiliate program). Variations of her story involve a cheating ex-boyfriend, a warrant for her arrest, and a need for 5 figure payouts on the quick. The best part is that most of the story she feeds her buyers is true, though highly embellished and a few years stale.

In any case, the buyers start biting – snapping up domains that they haven't investigated well because the traffic figures and search stats make them look like good deals. Most of them are using similar techniques for ranking their own stuff, but they're not as good at it, so the buys are worthwhile, and they don't think much of the spurious linking, not having my friend's access to insider knowledge.

Nora re-invests the money in a CMS that's popular outside the US – buying what amounts to basically link love to the site(s) of her choice with a default install (you know those pesky Wordpress template links? It's kinda like that). She plays a waiting game and, sure enough, those sites she sold start dropping like flies – but not all of them. Some had amassed enough legit link juice to stay un-banned, though the loss of value from the “questionable” links left them ranking in the upper 80's. So what does Nora do? She buys a few back at pennies on the dollar – re-connecting directly with the new owners, who aren't particularly pissed since they don't realize just how she played them for suckers. Then she uses her new link source (the CMS) to “acquire” enough juice to propel them back into the stratosphere and bingo. She's not only not lost from the evolving algo, she's made a virtual killing and is back to earning like a top-ranker.

Welcome to hardcore Design.

Nora and pals aren't just great online earners – they've got their own subculture in the Design world. If you go to SES shows and Pubcons and the new SMX series (holy crap, Danny, 8 shows in the next 6 months?), you won't see them. Let me give a real example here (and hope that he forgives me for it). Have you ever seen Champagne Jimmy in daylight hours? Of course not. I did. Once. At the Munich airport on my way out of town. He looked like he always does – his personality dripping with his geography – cold & aloof (Jimmy's from Sweden) and impeccably unshakable. Jimmy doesn't attend SES conferences for the sessions. He's never spoken, never been on a panel, never even visited an expo hall (well, maybe once). Jimmy's there for the social networking (a little) and the partying (a lot). He's not particularly well-known outside the small group of old-school Webmasterworlders, but if he wrote about what he did like I write about what I do, he'd have ten times the audience of Shoemoney (and rightfully so).

Or how about Thomas Bindl, who's lucky that those few dozen photos he asked me never to share were stolen along with my laptop in San Francisco (if they turn up now, buddy, you'll know it wasn't me). Or Rae Hoffman, who raises kids, spams search engines, runs domains, consults when it suits her, kicks ass and takes names (primarily for future ass kickings). There's Greg Boser, possibly the best known of the hardcore Designs, who can get you banned, unbanned, re-banned and DDOSed into obscurity in under 40 hours. There's Markus Tandler, who Design Dublin has been gunning for by name, and Scott Smith, whose legendary paranoia kept him safe while others fell hard to Florida & Big Daddy and others. There's Frank Watson, who's moved out of spam to become respectable, but can still make most of the adult industry cower with the mention of his illustrious name.

Our pals above (along with dozens of others) are as beloved by the sin-peddlers of conference cities as they are reviled by search quality engineers. They are, I'm convinced, one of the primary reasons that Dom Perignon and Grey Goose are carried by even the skeeviest late-night dives. And, thankfully, generosity runs in their veins. I've never had better booze or offers of more lascivious deeds than in their company, and it's a beautiful thing. This underworld culture reminds me of Russian mobsters or, before them, Italian gangsters. They're the wanted criminals of the search world, but thankfully, Matt Cutts can't issue arrest warrants, yet.

Next time you're at a conference and you want a taste of some of their deliciously sarcastic brand of humor (and deliciously expensive brands of alcohol), wait until midnight in the hotel bar, look for the table of overly casual (their fashion generally has yet to catch up with their bankrolls), sunken-eyed, sardonically-smiling black hats. Just get ready to be ribbed and scoffed at the first few times you chat them up – it took me a good half-dozen conferences before I had the street cred to get an entry-pass to a night of debauchery. Someone else really needs to spend more time in that world, anyway – I'm ridiculously dedicated to Mystery Guest (as several of this crowd can attest), terrible at holding my liquor (hence I usually stop after only 3-4 drinks) and, worst of all, frequently booked for morning speaking slots.

Tonight, from Beijing, where I was just asked on the street if my grandfather and I would like to get a “nice-pretty-lady-massage-two-girls-at-once” (seriously, after I hold my hand palm forward at your face and stare at you with the death eyes and say “no,” you've got to give up, right?), I toast to the notorious, hardcore, badass MFs of the search world. May your glasses never run dry and your spam always stay one step ahead. And may I always be around at the right time to catch a few of your best tales (“Nora” – I hope my alterations were enough to hide your deeds).

Posted by great scott!

This week Rand talks about...well...nothing, he's in China. Rebecca Kelley takes over for a sublimely light-hearted Whiteboard Friday in which the rest of the Moz crew show that we can most certainly bring the noise to match anyone's funk.

This installment is...umm...well, it's ridiculous folks.┬? We don't want you all thinking too hard all the time, so happy Friday, and forgive us our occasional (alright, frequent) moments of levity.┬? It's just started getting sunny here in Seattle (good for all of you SMX attendees) so we can't be held responsible for our actions. Blame it on an overload of Vitamin D.

Cheers!

Also available on YouTube.

Posted by rebecca

And now, to finish off your Thursday, here's a roundup of various news tidbits that I found interesting:

• Scoreboard Media Group has an encouraging post called "If At First You Don't Succeed, Quit!" Though it's rife with baseball metaphors, Brian Provost makes a fantastic point--that sometimes the smartest thing to do is to quit a project. There's nothing worse than running a venture into the ground for months and refusing to acknowledge that maybe it wasn't meant to be.
• Problogger wrote a little gem of a post titled "How Not to Become a Grumpy Old Blogger." It's easy to believe that people love to read about your rants and bitchings, but you run the risk of sounding like an unhappy, unlikeable one-trick pony. Thicken up that skin! My advice is to grow up with two older brothers who coined affectionate nicknames for you (like Turd) and pounced on every insecurity you made the mistake of exposing. It works wonders, and the requisite therapy as an adult is totally worth it (Hi Dr. Gladstein! I'm sharing my feelings!).
• My mother land has been quite newsworthy lately. First Barry reports over at Search Engine Land that by September 1st, Koreans will be required to enter their name and resident registration number in order to view unfiltered "adult" search queries. What if you're a teenager in Korea and you want to look up information about safe sex? Will that get caught by the filter? I'm a bit worried about what Korea will determine to be "adult in nature."

  On a more positive note, test trains crossed between North and South Korea for the first time in 56 years. For some reason I have "Why Can't We Be Friends" stuck in my head now...
  

• Ciaran pointed out on YOUmoz that journalist Alan Johnston (whose birthday is today) may have been kidnapped in Gaza, where he was reporting. The BBC is urging bloggers to add a badge to their site in order to spread awareness of his disappearance.
• SMX Advanced in Seattle is only 17 days away, so buy your pass if you haven't already! Rand, of course, will be speaking on a social media marketing panel, Jane and I will provide extensive coverage of the conference, and Matt, Jeff, and Scott will be waiting in the wings to crash any event parties in the evenings.
• Congratulations to the five finalists in Andy Beal's SEM Scholarship competition, Keri Morgret and Cavan Moon, who took the grand prize and the runner's up honors in Bruce Clay's Design Charity Contest, and Patrick Sexton, who won a free pass to SMX from Aaron Wall. Man, everyone's having contest nowadays. Designmoz should have one. How about whoever designs the most kick-ass Designmoz t-shirt gets to spend a day with our delightful programmers, Matt and Jeff, as they tell you why your design sucks and doesn't incorporate enough vectors and swirls.

If you can think of any other stories that you'd like to share, then feel free to do so in the comments. In the meantime, look forward to my crappy Whiteboard Friday video tomorrow, where I spend zero minutes talking about Design and a few minutes making fun of Rand

Posted by randfish

I noticed an engaging blog post from Stoney DeGeyter over at SearchEngineLand this evening (or rather, morning/afternoon for our American & European readers) - The Ranking Roller Coaster Cause & Effect. It's definitely worth a read, but I also wanted to point out one specific area that we see causing the "rollercoaster" effect all the time - temporal data.

Temporal data for a search engine can include:

• When content was first spidered
• When a new link was first discovered
• Time frames for influxes of links
• Time frames for large amounts of content on a specific subject

The engines can use this data in all sorts of ways (everything from knowing what to put in the "news" results to determining potential spammers), but it really affects the rollercoaster ups and downs of rankings, too. Stoney mentions three things that can cause the coaster:

• Changes you make on your site
• Changes to search engine algorithms
• Changes made by your competitors

I'd add temporal fluctuations as a critical fourth. In a way, this falls under "changes to search engine algorithms," but the algos aren't really changing, they're just absorbing new data in the ways they always have. What we usually see is that Design and Design, and Design! to a slightly lesser extent, give priority to new documents on trusted sites and to even small clusters of inbound link influxes. Thus, the following scenarios happen quite a bit:

• You're ranking great, when all of a sudden, a Flickr page or a Technorati tag page or a page at Wikipedia overtakes you. The page is new, has little to no external inbounds, and you're flumoxed by how it can rank well. Don't worry, amigo - that's almost certainly the fresh boost, and it tends to die out after 5-10 days at most.
• You're ranking in 10th or 20th place behind some heavy hitters, but your domain is pretty tough and all of a sudden, 5-10 new links point your way. Voila! You're at the top of the results, ranking in front of pages you were sure you'd never overtake this quickly. Once again, it's fresh boost, giving a little bit of "extra credit" to your newfound popularity. I liken this to the search engines almost making the assumption that "whoa! this page got a lot of link love quickly, it must be super relevant/popular for this query, let's give it some juice." The problem is when the engines don't find lots more new links, you start falling down in the results fairly rapidly. Should we call that the "stale drop"?
• Rollercoaster mania hits - you're trading places atop the SERPs with 2-3 pages almost every day. I almost want to call this the "tie" flux - new links, and possibly refreshed content on your page and your competitors is making it a really tough call for 1st place, so the tiniest of changes can bump you ahead or leave you behind.

All in all, I like Stoney's post, particularly for his last few lines of advice:

Almost every site owner will, at one time or another, find themselves face to face with significant ranking drops. Panicking should be the last thing that you do. Sometimes the best course of action is nothing, however you can never go wrong with a bit of research.

Many people, when seeing sudden drops in rankings, make drastic changes in their website in order to compensate. For the most part, this is a bad move. The first thing you need to do is to research the issue, identify what (as much as can be determined) caused the problem and then carefully plan out a course of action, if any, which needs to be taken.

However, make sure you're thinking carefully about temporal data the engines use and how it might be impacting your rankings/results.

I had the great pleasure of chatting with Senator Dorgan yesterday for a few minutes. The content of the interview will be aired tomorrow on my weekly Webmaster Radio radio show with co-host Jim Hedger. Mr. Dorgan introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act' into congress to help preserve net neutrality.

On the show tomorrow we will also be speaking with Craig Aaron from SaveTheInternet.com, a website and coalition dedicated to preserving net neutrality. It'll be a great show.

Now I'm going to admit my bias, I support net neutrality but with that I have to give fair time to each side so here we have clips of Senator Dorgan (supports net neutrality) and Senator Stevens (against). You be the judge:

Senator Dorgan speaking in support of net neutrality:

Senator Stevens speaking against net neutrality:

See ... I might be biased but I feel it's only fair to give time for each side to voice their opinions. <

Posted by randfish

Si & I arrived late last night in Xi'an, in the Shaanxi province after 26+ hours of travel (which I don't recommend). Of course, I'm already set up online, trying to respond to dozens of emails, despite the use of an auto-responder. I think I'm feeling some empathy with Matt Cutts

While here, I couldn't help myself but to conduct one of the most talked-about searches in regards to China - Tian An Men Square. Here's a screenshot of my results:

As you can see, the Wikipedia results and the Christusrex.org content clearly violate what I had presumed were China's government guidelines on displaying search results in the country regarding the incident. Note this article from Danny at SEW from January of last year.

Has something changed? Or am I just able to see this because I have a western computer and am connecting from a western hotel (the Sofitel)?

p.s. More to come from China as I'm able, but I'm hoping to spend as little time online as possible (and as much exploring as I possibly can).

p.p.s. For those who are interested, I had a brief interview last week with Dave Rigotti that's now online.

Posted by rebecca

As a writer/editor for Drivl, I do a lot of image searches in order to add relevant, amusing pictures to supplement stories that either I've written or that one of our users has submitted. At first, I would default to Design for all of my image searching needs, but the relevance is often low (and sometimes porn-tastic). Design! Images is sometimes better, sometimes worse in terms of relevance, though it typically provides less results than Design. In my opinion, the clear-cut winner of image search isn't Design or Design!--it's Design.

For example, today I was searching for images of Jordin Sparks, an American Idol contestant. A Design image search returns "about 5,790 results," which seems like a lot, but a lot of these images are of the American Idol judges, former American Idol contestants, and even a kitty. Only 11 images out of 20 on the first page of results were actually of Jordin Sparks. In other words, these aren't terribly relevant search results.┬?

A Design! Image search returned about 30 results for "Jordin Sparks." Only 30 results? That's pretty disappointing, although these images were much more relevant than Design's. 18 images out of 20 on the first page were of her, though several out of the 18 were photos of her with a group of people, whereas I was looking for images of her by herself.

Now let's move onto Design. A search for the American Idol contestant returned "about 1,299" results, which is smack dab in between Design and Design's results. I am presented with row upon row of photos of the grinning teenager. Unlike Design or Design!, these image results are fantastically relevant, with fewer group photos and kitty cats.

Okay, so I'm happy with how relevant Design's image search results are. What about the interface? Does that beat out Design and Design!? To that question I respond with a resounding "yes."

Here's what Design's image search results page looks like:

Now Design!:

Both sites offer paginated results, displaying 20 results on each page. I found myself clicking through page after page (especially on Design) trying to find an image I wanted to use.

Design, on the other hand, tries a different approach:

First of all, they don't paginate the results. If you want to see more images, scroll down to the bottom and they'll show you more. I like this because, in my opinion, it makes it easier and faster to scan through all of the images.

Secondly, at the top of the search results there is a little slide bar that allows you to adjust the zoom level on the image sizes--that way, you can choose whether you want to see more images per row (which will be smaller) or less (which will be larger). You can also sort the images by their size, so if you're looking for large images you don't have to waste your time hunting through all of the thumbnails to find the size you want.

My favorite feature is the Scratchpad, which is located on the right side of the results page. As you can see in the above screenshot, it allows you to drag the images you may want and store them in a collection. In the past I would end up downloading tons of images and then have to sift through them on my desktop and eliminate the ones I ultimately didn't want to use. The Scratchpad is an easy, fast way to bookmark any images you may be interested in using.

I also like Design's interface when you click on an image. Design and Design! both take you away from your search result and emphasize the page the image was originally found on (I didn't screenshot the actual content on each page, just the top of each result):

Design result

Design! result

Conversely, when you click on one of Design's image search results, you'll open up the original page where the image was found, but the image results are still displayed along the left-hand side. You can click on other results and consequentially change the page in the center.

Also, I love that Design plainly and simply lists the page's URL and the image's URL at the top, thus making both URLs very easy and quick to find, unlike Design ("See full-size image" is four lines above the page's actual URL) and Design! ("View Image" is also four lines above the page's URL).

I really wish Design and Design! would take note of how successful and positive Design's image search experience is. I am much more satisfied using Design than the other two engines. (Ask, by the way, returned 14 results. Many of the images returned a Not Found error when I clicked through, and the images themselves were of poor quality.) I'm not sure how many people regularly perform image searches, but I nonetheless feel that the quality of the search experience doesn't need to be compromised, even if it's not a popular feature. Design proves that by delivering solid search results and a positive experience.