The content nobody else had

I first noticed the gap in 2016, when I took part in the physics olympiad selection myself. Some schools and teachers had complete sets of past papers, solutions and training material; some students struggled even to collect a full set of past papers. For a national competition, that affects how fair it is.

We had long wanted a site of our own, but our technical skills weren’t enough, I had little experience building websites, and upkeep, file management and cost all had to be thought through — so it never went live. In the end I didn’t start from wanting an impressive website. For me at the time, being able to put complete content up quickly mattered more than building a beautiful site from scratch that would be hard to maintain.

Google Sites wasn’t the strongest choice visually or technically. It fitted the actual problem: a large pile of PDFs, images and videos, and not every problem worth a video of its own. It costs little to maintain and works directly with Google Drive, so the material we already had could quickly become something anyone can browse.

The papers alone weren’t enough; almost nobody had complete solutions. Almost all of the videos and handwritten solutions on the site are my own, and the way they look comes from physics classes I’d sat in.

The teacher would often use four large whiteboards that slid up and down. A formula or a derivation might start in the top-left corner; five or ten minutes later the working had reached the bottom-right, and the earlier board could still be pulled back to check which assumption, formula or picture had been used. Understanding physics depends on space and position — I remember that the formula was top-left, that the diagram sat to the right of the derivation, that this step uses that earlier result. Turn it all into one long waterfall of text and the reader keeps scrolling back to find things — effort that has nothing to do with the physics.

So I use OneNote and tools like it to give a solution a larger visual space, where a student can see how the formulas, the diagrams and the steps of the derivation sit in relation to each other.

The aim was simple: when a student searches 物⁠奧⁠考⁠古⁠題, they should find us first. That meant deciding how to plan the addresses so a search engine could read the site’s structure; what to gather in one place and what to split into pages of its own; what a student arriving from a search should see first, without being pulled away by everything else; and how to balance the brand’s key visual against the working content.

For Taiwan’s papers the answer is one page per round per year, each at an address built from the same parts. Every page title carries both 物⁠奧 and a longer form, 物⁠理⁠奧⁠林⁠匹⁠亞 or 物⁠理⁠奧⁠匹, and both 題⁠目 and 試⁠題. The addresses weren’t always like this: in August 2022 the hub was at /olympiad-problems, and in February 2023 a year page sat at /免費の資源/olympiad-problems/….

The strategy worked quickly. For many olympiad searches the site has long ranked near the top, after Taiwan’s official olympiad site; for 物⁠奧⁠考⁠古⁠題 it was often the first result that wasn’t an official one. Its growth came almost entirely from organic search, not ads: complete papers and solutions brought search traffic, the traffic brought students to the brand, and the brand turned into real business. I didn’t keep complete Analytics or Search Console data from the period, so the rankings are my own account, not exported data.

Later I took some content down myself, after reconsidering where the copyright lines were. Once the site had grown, the question was no longer only whether the content was complete, but which of it should stay public for the long run, and what the brand should take responsibility for.