American Association Of Web Masters

If you do a Google search for your main keyword, how many results will Google return? I punched in the term "real estate" and Google returned over 300 - MILLION listings. What practical benefit can come from having such a huge list? No sane person would look through all those listings. So, a person needs to "refine" their search. Perhaps they enter the state, or the city or maybe even the neighborhood and they end up with a few hundred thousand. Better, but still absurd.

When a webmaster (and I use the term loosely to include any one with a web site) launches a site they will be at the end of that huge list. Experienced webmasters know that the launch of the website is just the beginning of a long promotion period.

I would like to make some analogies to illustrate some major points about this process. First, I want to liken webmasters to elephants. Then, I want to liken web traffic to peanuts. The reason I choose them two for the analogy is their relative size. Elephants are huge, peanuts are small. Elephants eat peanuts just like webmasters "eat" web traffic. And just like elephant's appetite for peanuts (it takes a whole lot of peanuts to fill an elephant) it takes a whole lot of site visitors to fill a webmaster's appetite for traffic. Webmasters tend to travel in herds. We don't call them herds, we call them search terms or keywords but they serve many of the same functions as herds. So there are "herds" of rela estate sites, herds of lawyer sites, etc.

Well, if webmasters are like elephants, and traffic is like peanuts then what would a search engine be? I think a good analogy for search engines in relation to the others would be a feed trough. A search engine is like a feed trough where the elephants come to get their peanuts. Now some may disagree with this analogy saying that the search engines "send" the traffic and are more like a zoo keeper bringing the daily diet of peanuts to all the elephants. I think the search and click patterns of the general public show the fallacy of that idea though. The bulk of the search engine visitors click on the first three listings, then on the remainder of the first page, and a few more go on to the second page but generally, that is as far as the distribution goes. If the search engines are distributing peanuts then most of the elephants are starving.

That's why I think the feed trough analogy is more fitting. Those elephants that are big and powerful enough fight their way to the feed trough and get all the peanuts they want. They can even package the peanuts and resell them, if they want, in the form of ads on their sites that bring in money, in exchange for sending peanuts to other sites.

So what is a poor starving elephant to do? As the demand grew among the starving elephants for peanuts certain "wise" elephants started noticing how the peanuts were being delivered to the trough so they set up businesses called "peanut trough optimization" (sic search engine optimization) which started selling tips to hungry elephants about the delivery methods used for the peanuts. With this knowledge the elephants with this secret knowledge could beat the more powerful elephants to the feed trough. Well, all that might be true, but there are still a whole lot of starving elephants out there.

All this brings up the issue of "access" to the "feed trough". You see, even if you have tons of peanuts, but you only have a few feed troughs, there won't be enough room for the elephants to get to the feed trough. Those on the outside of the rush starve, and those on the inside are pre-occupied with maintaining their position. If this is an erroneous analogy and the feed trough is, in fact, large enough (after all, it IS the Internet) to deliver peanuts the evidence would show that a new elephant could walk up to it and get all the peanuts it wants. That is not the situation, however, as previously discussed. New elephants have to push their way to the trough.

Some have tried training the elephants. One method thought of was to paint white lines radiating from the feed trough and then training the elephants to all stand in or on these lines to get to the feed trough. These white lines are an analogy for keywords. If one line, like the term "real estate", for exammple has 300 million elephants in line then the "trainers" teach an elephant needs to find another line to stand in. There are even Internet tools that can count how many "elephants" are using a particular line (keyword).

As the elephants circle the feed trough looking for a small line they soon realize all the lines are full and as they get closer to the trough they all disappear under the mass of elephants trying to feed anyway. So the trough owners developed a way to have the elephants pay to be moved up to the trough ahead of everyone else. They charge them "per peanut". this helped get the big, powerful elephants aside so other elephants could eat and since there always was an abundance of peanuts anyway they can maintain both systems at the same time. They can both charge elephants to be brought to the feed trough and also let others push and shove for the free peanuts. And since there are plenty of starving elephants there is plenty of demand for more paid peanuts. All the feed trough owner needs to do is figure a faster, more efficient way to bring the paying elephants back and forth from the feed trough. And, oh yeah, they can always raise the price for the peanuts along the way. It should be obvious to anyone with the least amount of experience promoting websites that this is an analogy of the Pay Per Click system.

As the current systems train the elephants to keep their mind on the white lines (keywords) none of them realize the problem is the centralized feed trough. Elephants want to go to where the peanuts are. If someone were to mention to the elephants that there just may be other ways to distribute peanuts they'd be trumpeted out of the herd.

But what if there were hundreds or thousands of feed troughs with the same number of peanuts distributed between them then all the elephants could get access to peanuts, couldn't they?

That in a nutshell :-) is what the Bungee Bones site is about. The Internet was built on the idea of the hyperlink. Collecting millions of hyperlinks in one location just doesn't make sense from a logistical consideration. Bungee Bones is about establishing millions of "feed troughs" owned and operated by webmasters themselves. Bungee Bones is about enabling an easy to use system for webmasters to create "micro" Googles (or macro hyperlink directories) and getting paid for it.