User:MrsZivie/sandbox

DaniWeb is an online message board for technologists and computer programmers founded in 2002 by college sophomore Dani Wolkowicki (née Horowitz). DaniWeb's business networking tool utilizes Wolkowicki's patents which claim an exclusive right to match users of a social network based on their chat behavior . As of 2014, DaniWeb was serving over 10 million visitors a month. However, that number is significantly lower as of 2024.

In as early as 2003, DaniWeb became one of the first online publications to independently track and monetize user behavior.

In 2007, DaniWeb community administrator Davey Winder broke the story that TomTom GPS devices came from the factory infected with a virus. The story was picked up by a number of news outlets, and ultimately forced TomTom to admit the faux pas. As a result of the story, Winder received the IT Security Journalist of the Year (UK) award .

In 2008, Google awarded DaniWeb with their Enterprise Superstar award. DaniWeb was one of only about two dozen sites to have ever received the award and been featured on the now-defunct Google Enterprise blog. In 2009, Wolkowicki was invited as a guest lecturer at Google's NYC campus to present on how she used Google Analytics to drive actionable improvements.

In 2015, the popular Internet security service Have I Been Pwned? reported that DaniWeb suffered a data breach that resulted in the disclosure of over 1 million accounts including email and IP addresses . The data breach, coupled with a Google algorithm change that strongly favored highly-curated Q&A site Stack Overflow, resulted in a significant and permanent decline in DaniWeb's traffic.

Nevertheless, throughout the early 2000s, DaniWeb was regularly recognized as the most popular C++ community on the Internet. Bjarne Stroustrup, the founder of the C++ programming language, is himself a member of DaniWeb. Although no longer the case, artifacts of its former popularity within the software development space persist on the web today in the form of thousands of citations within printed media and scholarly literature .

= Google Panda =

In 2011, DaniWeb was initially cited in an article at Search Engine Land as one of the top 100 domains to suffer losses by the Google Panda algorithm. Wolkowicki, as well as other members of the DaniWeb website, were vocal about being unfairly targeted by Google through a series of self-published articles and forum posts. Wolkowicki additionally publicly documented technical improvements made along with web traffic fluctuations, and how they corresponded to Google algorithm updates, over the next handful of months.

Popular SEO news outlets such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch , Web Pro News , and SEO industry leaders such as Barry_Schwartz_(technologist) and Danny Sullivan (technologist) all began chronicling DaniWeb's successes and failures within all of their their Google Panda coverage. Notably, Matt Cutts, then working at Google on their search quality team, acknowledged that DaniWeb's coverage influenced changes in Google's algorithm when he was quoted in the Google Search Central Live Q&A, "You see a site like DaniWeb complain and then we find signals and say, okay, well here's a way we can differentiate between this site versus the sites that might be a little bit lower quality." . The website subsequently became known across blogs and social media as the unofficial poster-child for the Google Panda algorithm.

= Patents =

DaniWeb's proprietary technology is based on a family of patents owned by Dazah Holdings LLC, a holding company owned by Wolkowicki , which describe a user recommendation engine in which users of a social network can be matched with each other by predicting likelihood of mutual interest. It is based on an algorithm implemented on DaniWeb that matches question askers with potential answerers.

Throughout 2013 and 2014, Wolkowicki consulted the Google Helpouts team towards devising a way to incentivize end-users to ask questions and be matched with potential answerers.

The patent family is considered particularly strong, and as of 2024, received citations by Facebook, Verizon, IBM, and Slack, amongst others. This is unusual given the relatively young age of the patent family, whose application was first filed in 2017.