Remove Majestic-12?

[alexc]

Originally Posted by Biggles

Your project homepage is misleading then. You say Majestic 12 is about making a distributed search engine. It's not. The average person reading that would think you mean a search engine like Google, or Bing, or Yahoo. The project is strictly about making the backlinks database which you sell.

We have a search engine live right now and we get it updated twice a month - this is a backlinks search engine (which Google has also got but in a much more limited public scope), even though our aspiration is to have full text search engine that we actually had in 2006 running but I realised we need backlinks search in order to understand how to rank results better.



Either way we have a search engine that is distributed - not just crawling actually, we also use multiple servers to index data and also build index.

So please, be open and admit that this is a commercial project. It exists to help your company sell SEO products. It doesn't exist to build a competitor to Google, it doesn't exist to do research into distributed crawling. It's about making money.

We are earning money because we have to fund development: buy expensive servers and pay staff. The project was run by a Limited company from start - we are not a registered charity nor we are a non-commercial company: this was from start and this is shown clearly on our About page here: http://www.majestic12.co.uk/about.php - are you blind or just don't want to see clear words: "The development work and hardware is funded by Majestic-12 Ltd."?

Oh, and as you're based in the UK, you should be aware that the Advertising Standards Authority now have jurisdiction over marketing on websites. It's pretty clear that your homepage is not honest and truthful about the aims of Majestic 12.

I disagree that we are misleading, we have already succeeded in having a search engine, it's just specialised and focuses on backlinks as we need that information to fund ourselves in the first place and also to rank things properly in future full text search engine to which we are still committed.



Feel free to report us to ASA - I am sure they are reasonable people who'd look at available evidence and make quick decision that you are just wasting taxpayers money (that would mean part of the money earned by the project because the company behind it pays tax every single month).

None of this is relevant to anything I've said. I know you've worked hard. I know that it took a long time. And I also know that you've shared a percentage with the community. I'm not looking for you to change anything about the setup of the project. I just want an admission that this is commercial. I don't think it belongs in the Vault, but that in itself shouldn't affect whether you continue the project or not.

Well, factually we are certainly not a charity - the company behind the project is registered as a Limited liability company, the link to About page says that pretty clearly. If we have opted to have any other status then we'd be very limited at what we can do - for example charity won't be able to earn money having Majestic SEO, and we would not be able to secure vital investment round that we had at start of last year.

I also know that use of bandwidth for commercial purposes like this using home connections contravenes the terms and conditions of most ISPs.

You need to speak more for yourself and less for people - if your ISP prohibts running our distributed client then you should not be doing it, by all means stop - it is you who is responsible for checking it.

I have run projects without points before. I just object to volunteers being used for commercial gain.

Volunteers at Majestic 12 project have full information on what's going on - they are not "used" - anyone who disagrees with the way Majestic12 project is run can just stop crawling and do something else. We have been extremely open about what's going on and why - if you bother read our forum going back few years when Majestic SEO was started you'll see full information was shared.

Alex, the project website misleads people as to the intention of the project. You say it's to build a distributed search engine, so why can't you search using it?

You can search it here: http://www.majesticseo.com - we have live index that is specialised and currently limited to backlinks data. We had full text search done but had to shut it down because we did not have enough hardware and rankings were not working well (too much spam as our ranking was too poor when it came to backlinks).



So we have results actually - publicly available too. Talking of which - I find your approach of demanding final goal being available to you some months after you contributed to the project laughable - did SETI@home find aliens yet? Did some other many other projects achieve their final goal? We are actually among handful of projects who can demostrate that we've achieved something on MASSIVE scale that only large companies like Google could do, in fact we are still the only project that found 1 trln unique URLs after Google did it: http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/...on-urls-found/

(note on that blog post how we mention Majestic 12 - we are always open where the data comes from).

Sure a limited amount is available for free, but only a limited amount

It's unlimited for your own sites - we provide 100% of data if you verify your own site. If you want competitor analysis then this is very much commercial activity and we felt it was fair that in this case people who benefit from such analysis would contribute to the costs of having database made available in the first place.

It's not a true distributed computing project and I don't think it belongs in the Vault.

We are a true distributed computing project and have been from start. Now I don't speak for the Vault but as I understand under current rules we certainly belong here.

DISCLAIMER - I've actually used Majestic SEO for commercial purposes!

And so have tens of thousands our customers most of whom never paid us a penny! We actually provide a LOT of competitive info for free to anyone - we just can't provide 100% of data to everyone because we'll have to shutdown next day so that nobody gets any data.



Anyway, I've really wasted a lot of time with you now - you are entitled to have an opinion, and you are fully entitled to not like the project or me personally, that's fine - what you are not entitled is to spread lies about our project specifically saying that we don't have a search engine - this crosses the line between opinion and defamation, read up on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation



Have a nice day - I am still working today - need to finish version of rules for DCP LLP (that's Distributed Computing Partners LLP created for the benefit of volunteers, so much us "not" being a distributed computing project )



Alex

[alexc]

Oh, here is one for you to read on web search engines:

"A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

We qualify perfectly - it's just right now we don't offer full text search which is a type of search engine, we did have it in the past though, again if you bothered to research about project you'd find this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...hnologysection

Here is the quote: "Over the past few months, 7bn pages have been crawled although, at 1bn pages, the completed index lags behind for now"

I guess you know more about building web scale search engines than me on what route to take

[DFire]

Since the original post was corrected by Alex of its factual errors, what are the actual reasons now to remove MJ12 from the vault? We've established that it has a commercial aspect, but that is a means to an end(money doesn't grow on trees) and for this project it was a necessary step to keep improving the search engine. Alex has bent over backwards to explain the project and Razor posted earlier that the project conforms to all vault rules.

From my perspective(and I don't believe in coincidences) it looks like everyone who is calling for Majestic-12's head on a stick is [EDITED BY RUSTY - THIS THREAD IS ABOUT M12, NOT A CHANCE TO BASH OTHER TEAMS - KEEP IT CLEAN PLEASE]

*This is all strictly my opinion, for what it's worth.

Originally Posted by LinearB

As one of the people in at the beginning of the DC-Vault it makes me smile how things have developed . It's original intention was to encourage friendly team rivalry whilst also encouraging people to point their PC Mhz at some of the underdog projects. It was never the intention to judge the project, just that they be open to all and provide some kind of benchmark to measure contribution.

Everybody's view of what makes a worthwhile project is different and sometimes it was just what project best suited a person's cicumstances (OS Support / CPU Type / Memory / Dial-Up requirements (remember dialup ).

Judgements have been made with some projects based on KeyClicks for instance but on the whole the less restrictions the better in my opinion.

Well put.

[Rusty]

THIS THREAD IS ABOUT M12, NOT A CHANCE TO BASH OTHER TEAMS - KEEP IT CLEAN PLEASE.

[runesk]

I think it's about time to end this thread and possibly start a new.

As far as I can tell by reading this thread, there have not been presented any proof that MJ-12 violates current rules, and further discussion regarding removal seems to stagnate.

This discussion bears much the same arguments as the inclusion of Aqua thread, and even the same arguments were pretty much presented there, no change were made then.

As more people seems to think the rules should include some kind of policy regarding commercial projects, I suggest we stop the current MJ-12 discussion and heads over to a rule change discussion.

.R

[DFire]

Rusty, I apologize, it was not my intention to bash any team; I was just pointing out the fact that all of the members who were calling for the exclusion of Majestic 12 from the Vault were from the ArsTechnica team, that is all. If it were a mix of people from various teams that asked this same question I wouldn't have thought twice about it. And I agree with you runesk, it's time to put this past us

[Beyond]

Originally Posted by runesk

I think it's about time to end this thread and possibly start a new.

As far as I can tell by reading this thread, there have not been presented any proof that MJ-12 violates current rules, and further discussion regarding removal seems to stagnate.

This discussion bears much the same arguments as the inclusion of Aqua thread, and even the same arguments were pretty much presented there, no change were made then.

As more people seems to think the rules should include some kind of policy regarding commercial projects, I suggest we stop the current MJ-12 discussion and heads over to a rule change discussion.

.R

Seconded.

[Razor_FX_II]

Originally Posted by DFire

Rusty, I apologize, it was not my intention to bash any team; I was just pointing out the fact that all of the members who were calling for the exclusion of Majestic 12 from the Vault were from the ArsTechnica team, that is all. If it were a mix of people from various teams that asked this same question I wouldn't have thought twice about it. And I agree with you runesk, it's time to put this past us

I agree completely.

[Beyond]

Originally Posted by DFire

Rusty, I apologize, it was not my intention to bash any team; I was just pointing out the fact that all of the members who were calling for the exclusion of Majestic 12 from the Vault were from the ArsTechnica team, that is all. If it were a mix of people from various teams that asked this same question I wouldn't have thought twice about it. And I agree with you runesk, it's time to put this past us

If you'd like to follow the events leading up to my posting this thread, please feel free to check out our forum:

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtop...6362&start=640

As you can see, some of us were in fact enthusiastically promoting a MJ-12 membership drive when one of the new members pointed out that it had become a predominantly commercial project. Thus the thread here. Indirectly it is a team issue in that if people won't run it, it's hard to compete.

Let me be more specific about my personal concerns. It's not so much about commercialism in general but about freely releasing the results of the work of DC-Vault members. But all this can be discussed in a more generalized thread.

[Rusty]

OK about time to close this one unless you have something else to add about M12 ONLY


I just want to thank everyone for stopping by to posting.. Please feel free to post forum links on your own forum, get some DC'ers to pop by once in a blue moon and post, or just get some lurkers here.


Thanks to Alex as well for taking the time to post..

[runesk]

Originally Posted by Rusty

Thanks to Alex as well for taking the time to post..

I agree, to Alex

.R

[Beyond]

Originally Posted by runesk

I agree, to Alex

Ditto, thanks Alex and thanks everyone who posted.

[alexc]

Originally Posted by Rusty

Thanks to Alex as well for taking the time to post..

That's not a problem!

Thanks to Rusty for letting me know about this discussion and to everyone who contributed to it!

[Biggles]

Team creation and joining seems to be down and has been for around a week.

Just saying...

[alexc]

Originally Posted by Biggles

Team creation and joining seems to be down and has been for around a week.

Just saying...

Ah, that's my fault - we've rewritten central server and switched off old buckets server, so old URL did not work, use this one: http://crawl.majestic12.co.uk/ Oh - if you have a problem with something related to Majestic 12 project, then please post in our forum - I came here today by chance (felt the disturbance in the force!).