The fact that they are using rails demonstrates more newbie-style cluelessness, to me. Not even remotely a good choice. But, the sort of things 4 guys fresh out of college with no experience would think was the obvious choice.
It has a lot to do with Reddit in that Reddit was available, better, and already fairly well known. It's not like the article could possibly go "How Digg's Whatever Benefited Mixx.com". Reddit was basically standing there ready to soak up Digg users once masses of them stuck their heads up for long enough to notice that Digg isn't really that entertaining or informative, and other sites may suit them better.
I, too was annoyed when Google changed to automatically 'fixing' your terms a few years back. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they TELL you at the top, sometimes they don't. It took me a while to figure out that single quotes are ignored while double quotes are taken very seriously. In the meantime, the usefulness of Google went way down for me. I don't mind having to use double quotes, but it should be the other way around - I'd rather click a 'do a fuzzy improved search' box than have to say 'yes this is what I really want to search for I MEAN IT' with double quotes.
I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'.
Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon.
As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.
I totally agree. But still, these people are serious in a way. It's generally the hobby or very-very entry level range. The thing is, they'll spend plenty of money on supplies and marketplace fees, but have this aversion to purchasing something relatively virtual, especially as they think they can do themselves or get it for free. The same goes for their websites.
It's bad decision making, no doubt. They're sacrificing their professional image, and being penny-wise and pound foolish.
Their site really is slow as can be. I dread not being able to dig something up in my email, that means I have to go use Paypal's search - each page can seriously take 10-15 seconds to come up.
