Curiouser and Curiouser! on google

Capturing the Zeitgeist

Wed, 26 Jun 2002 10:26:04 +0100

Google is a wonderful box of tricks. Something else that's new to me:

Google Zeitgeist - Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google

Discovered via overstated.net the blog by Cameron Marlow, creator of BlogDex.

A bucket-o-Google

Tue, 09 Jul 2002 20:51:03 +0100

Okay re-installation time and what is the first thing that goes on after Radio? The google search bar.

What caught me out was that I automatically found myself clicking the "Always trust content from Google.com" button. This is the first time I have ever done this. I just don't, on principle.

But really I do trust Google. I have no idea what kind of a company they are really, but they seem very warm and fuzzy to me. I trust them.

That must be a helluva brand.

Alexa Toolbar?

Mon, 19 Aug 2002 15:44:38 +0100

Has anyone used the Alexa browser toolbar? I'm a Google toobar junkie so I'm not keen to replace it, but I'd like to know if it's any good.

Has pagerank run it's course?

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 07:23:11 +0100

Daniel Brandt: Google's Original Sin. [Scripting News]

» A good piece. The main thrust is that Google's reliance on pagerank, far from being democratic, is uniquely autocratic. Because sites with a high pagerank matter most, they have more power and it is harder for site with a low pagerank to get noticed regardless of the relevance of their onpage content.

"In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy."

The remedy?

"We feel that PageRank has run its course. Google doesn't have to abandon it entirely, but they should de-emphasize it. The first step is to stop reporting PageRank on the toolbar. This would mute the awareness of PageRank among optimizers and webmasters, and remove some of the bizarre effects that such awareness has engendered. The next step would be to replace all mention of PageRank in their own public relations documentation, in favor of general phrases about how link popularity is one factor among many in their ranking algorithms. And Google should adjust the balance between their various algorithms so that excellent on-page characteristics are not completely cancelled by low link popularity. "

Even if I agree, and I not certain that I do, it's hard to see Google give up what they see as a key differentiator. It's quite possible that they see an advantage for themselves in the tyranny of pageranks and the power of corporate America to wield them!

Why haven't Microsoft bought Google?

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 18:00:26 +0100

Why haven't Microsoft bought Google?

I want to know.

The PageRank lottery

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 18:39:18 +0100

Relevance Ranking Discriminates Against the Irrelevant!.

Has pagerank run it's course?.

Ok, no. Pagerank is not "democratic" by the "every webpage is equally valuable" definition. But then, every web page is not equally valuable.

The link real-estate on my webpage actually is worth a whole lot less than, say, the link real-estate on about.com or yahoo.com. The algorithm seems to me to be pretty accurate. Consider also that any webpage can become slashdotted. Anyone's site can become more relevant, interesting, well-linked, widely-read, in short, more "important".

For instance, I've ego-surfed google (that is, searching on one's own name) for the last 6 months as I've been working on this blog, and have noticed that yes I have risen in the ranks of "Michael Wilson"s. And not because I'm "the rich", just because I post content that people read.

Not only that, but any page can fall out of favor and drift back into obscurity.

Perhaps an explanation on why it "should" be democratic is in order, 'cause I just don't get it. Seems to me like someone's just pissy that their pagerank isn't very high.

[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

» Okay ya got me. I can't get above 5 no matter how hard I try (I wonder if Bryan Bell has a strippers theme?)

I agree that not every page should have equal rank and the whole "democratic vs." argument was probably a blind alley. But I do think there are three valid points here:

Unless your page rank is high for a query, you won't get listed. Regardless of how relevant your on-page content is.
It's very hard to get a high page rank, unless you already have a high page rank.
New players don't have a high page rank.

This, I think, unfairly discriminates against new content providers over the established players.

Perhaps a solution could be something like the US Green Card lottery. For those not familiar this is a lottery for non-US (and non-UK) citizens where the prize is a much sought after green card for around 100,000 people a year.

Perhaps Google should randomly bump the pagerank of 100,000 new pages each time it crawls and let nature takes its course...

otherwise, but at the same time I think the article highlights the point that it can (if their data is good) be very hard to "break into" the relevant search criteria regardless of how

Has Seb gone over to the Dark Side?

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 14:49:40 +0100

Nobility My Ass!.

Googlebombing Coble. I would ask, before you do this, how you think you might react if supporters of coble were to googlebomb Tara Sue? I'm gonna bet you'd be pretty pissed at that kind of lowbrow, fundamentally dishonest tactic.

So you would have us subvert access to Coble's website to reduce the exposure of people to a candidate you don't like? I'm guessing it's because you think the Coble-Berman bill restricts fundamental freedoms right? Ok, uhm... someone needs a smack with a clue-by-four.

Memetics experiment of the nobelest kind? You sure? Really? Seems like a pretty shitty thing to do. Not to mention ever so slightly hypocritical.

[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

» I'm not sure I agree, but It took me a while to figure it out (I started out not agreeing, then thought about it a bit and began to agree, then came right back around again).

As I read him, Seb is really only talking about making Tara sue a top 10 hit on Coble. Not eradicating Coble from the list. In fact I think the idea of having Tara Sue appear in a search for Coble is about right, in fact everyone running against him should appear as a service to the public looking for information about whose running. I notice that Tara actually links to Coble from her page.

So, I don't really think Seb is heading for the Dark Side just yet. But we'd better keep an eye on him, he could turn at any time!

The sad thing is that what really drew me to comment on this post is not the high brow moral philosophy but the phrase "smack with a clue-by-four" for which you are to be congratulated!

Seeing the real Google

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 14:59:45 +0000

News.Com: The Google Gods. [Scripting News]

» Interesting.

"But Google is examining its system, well aware that growing criticism could damage its credibility with the public at large."

Too late in my case.

I wrote a little while ago I wrote about how I felt warm and fuzzy about Google. Well this article and a another recent article about Google delisting sites without explanation has brought me to my senses. Google is a business, not a public servant.

Ego trippin

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 17:52:04 +0000

For what is worth, google indexes have been updated again, now instead of the 5th I'm the 3rd Paolo and "Dave" is back on the first page ";->". Check your ranking. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

» And I'm now the 65th Matt! This is so cool. Last time I wasn't even listed...

An interface to the structure of the web

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 14:27:33 +0000

Google Is Not A Search Engine. Google is an interface to the structure of the web. Google orders its results based on the structure of the ... [istori/log]

Google People: they're like real people only more Googlish

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 11:31:16 +0000

GooglePeople

"Welcome to GooglePeople! Try one of the example questions, or let your imagination go wild!

GooglePeople shows that with simple, yet effective, text mining techniques, answers to specific questions can be extracted from the vast data repository.

[Ralph Poole's Weblog]

Okay an easy one to start with:

GooglePeople is very confident that the answer to your question who is the godfather of soul? is:

James Brown

Let's try something harder:

GooglePeople is not sure it found the answer to your question "who is the best jazz guitar player?", but listed below are some possibilities to investigate.

Name	Confidence
Rock Guitar Player	* *
Joe Pass	*
John Scofield	*

No mention of Django Reinhardt so no points there.

How about:

GooglePeople is not sure it found the answer to your question "who is the best blogger?", but listed below are some possibilities to investigate.

Name	Confidence
Bill Clinton	*
Al Gore	*
Walter Mondale	*
Pat Buchanan	*

I'm not sure this thing is ready for prime time yet ;-)

Google Views: looks good from here

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 23:18:50 +0000

New Google Labs!. New Google Labs!: "Google Labs has two new projects: Google Viewer lets you view the web pages of your search results, in a slideshow fashion. [Archipelago]

I think the Google Viewer is going to become a powerful tool. It takes the power of Google much closer to the overall functinality provided by desktop tools like Copernic Agent.

Genesis of PageRank

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 21:15:33 +0000

I've been playing with Grokker Preview Release 2 this evening. It's a big improvement over PR1 in many ways although I still wouldn't recommend that anyone other than a search tool nut buy it at this point. However it did lead me to an interesting paper by Sergey Brin about Google. This was written in, I guess, 97/98 i.e. well before Google became the monster it is today.

However it does have the best description of the page rank algorithm and how it is calculated that I have seen so far. I'm guessing it's a good deal more sophisticated these days but this might be of interest for others like myself who wonder about the inner workings.

To quote from that paper:

2.1.1 Description of PageRank Calculation

Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page's importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows:

We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one.

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper.

Googlert does no RSS

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 14:34:39 +0000

Interesting: Googlert.

Interesting: Googlert

This looks neat. [_Go_]

Note: Currently untried by me. If I could remember where I stored down my Google key, I'd probably even try it. Thanks to Andy for pointing it out.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

It looks interesting, but you know the first thing that came to my mind?

Where is the RSS feed?

For this kind of service e-mail should now be a fallback!

Some people just don't get it...

Roogle

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 22:17:58 +0000

What 10 odd Hours of Hacking Can Produce: An RSS Search Engine.

What 10 odd Hours of Hacking Can Produce: An RSS Search Engine

further ado, I give you:

R O O G L E

(yeah that's RSS google)

And the UI is a total Google ripoff. Thank you to Google for the time being before I get around to changing it.

Want to see what feeds are indexed? Check out this out.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

This is pretty cool.

Darth Google

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 13:55:48 +0000

Chris Gulker: "The culture at Google is just not open and responsive to users." [Scripting News]

In following this Google: Jedi knights or Sith lords thread I came across something interesting and useful. A site, using the work of Dr. Michael C. Labossiere, which attempts to classify all the types of fallacy used in debate.

Birthday present for Paolo's blog

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 16:20:18 +0000

<%googlami( "Paolo Valdemarin", "Paolo")%> wanted a macro that would link directly from a term like Paolo Valdemarin to the first hit returned by Google for that term. Here is a macro that will do that. (To install, right click the link and select "Save As" then save it as googlami.txt in your Radio Userland macros folder).

To use it you would use the source view in the post editor and type in:

<%googlami( "what i want to search for")%>

and it will generate a complete HTML link for that search. If you want the text for the link to be different to the term, pass a second parameter with the text of the link, e.g.

<%googlami( "Paolo Valdemarin", "Paolo" )%>

Consider it a 1st birthday present for your blog :)

When Google news isn't

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 16:48:04 +0100

'Adios Google'. Letters Readers repelled by PR subterfuge [The Register]

It appears that Google have decided that company press releases and lobbyist puff pieces are legitimate news items as far as Google news is concerned.

One PageRank to rule them all

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 10:00:08 +0100

To Google, what is a blog?.

I haven't really commented on the "should blogs be in Google search results" debate, but one random question. What is a blog? What's the technical difference (from the perspective of a search engine) between my blog and The Register? I don't see how you can "filter" blogs. You can obviously change the page ranking mechanism to give certain types of sites an advantage or disadvantage, but I don't see how you can filter blogs. My blog is just a bunch of html created by a content management system.

If more people think that the google search results are poor because the top results are not "relevant" it means the ranking system is broken, not that something has to be "filtered". The whole point of a search engine is that it searches everything and finds the most relevant pages.

By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]

Joi's question was pretty much the question I had in mind when this first came up -- how will they do it? I mean if they could detect a blog by analyzing the page this would be pretty cool because they might be able to come up with a "garbage filter" algorithm at the same time!

Joi then goes on to make, for me, the right analysis. The issues are with the ranking system and, perhaps, that one ranking system does not fit all.

Maybe the time has come for Google user accounts?

Google viewless

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 21:42:57 +0100

Deploying Google Viewer. Greg reports that some of his search results contain a "View results as slide show" link, presumably using Google viewer. Have you seen this?... [Google Weblog]

The interface has an interesting CD player like styling to it. But in IE6 I got a script error that prevented it from doing anything more than look interesting. Bummer.

How to lose friends and influence people

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 18:27:30 +0000

Microsoft and Google: A Terrible Match. New York Times: Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?. Google, the highflying Silicon Valley Web search company, recently began holding... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Google becomes part of Microsoft? Then watch me drop Google like a shitty stick! I'm sure I wouldn't be alone in that.

GoogleDeskbar is the biz

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 15:12:05 +0000

Google Constellation?. Some of you may remember a product from Netscape around 1997 called Constellation. This was back in the days when Netscape was riding high, having rejected a huge buyout offer from Microsoft. Constellation was a frontal assault on the Windows franchise -- an attempt to make the browser the primary interface for accessing files and applications. Microsoft responded with various mechanisms to put Web content on the Windows desktop, and tightly integrated Internet Explorer into Windows. Of course, Contellation failed, Netscape lost its browser lead, and the company was never heard from again. (Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.)

So what to make of Google Deskbar. In an eerily parallel development, Google reportedly rejected a $10 billion buyout offer from Microsoft, and is now launching a product that puts Google directly onto the Windows desktop. Google's executives are much wiser that Netscape's, so you don't hear any sabre-rattling about how they are going to crush Windows. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been at two companies -- Sun and Novell -- that bore the brunt of successful Microsoft assaults, so you can bet he understands the game he's paying.

Perhaps Google has to go after Windows, or be a sitting duck when Microsoft comes after its search franchise. That's clearly what Microsoft intends. With its extraordinary financial and research assets, Microsoft can close the technical gap with Google's search engine. Whether it can overcome Google's mindshare is another question.
[Werblog]

I love the Deskbar. It is so much more what I want than the IE toolbar (or any of the Mozilla replacements I've used). I even prefer it to the Firebird quick search box. The way the search results pop up in a preview window is especially neat. It makes looking up URL's a breeze. As I was writing this I wanted the URL for Firebird. I copied the "firebird" to the clipboard, hit Ctrl+Alt+G, hit enter, waited a second for the pop-up, right clicked the URL to copy the link, clicked back to the browser (dismissing the pop-up) and added the link. I think that's a very effective tool.

Whether I will still want to be using anything by Google in 6 months time is an open question for me, but right now the Google Deskbar is great!

Don't worry... Search happy....

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 20:07:42 +0000

If you ever find yourself looking at file called ggviewer67-30.exe in the taskmanager and wondering if you've acquired a new trojan don't fret. You've probably installed the Google Deskbar.

Google logo museum

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:01:23 +0000

Marsarific Google!.
I love how Google changes their logo, and I just noticed that today's has the Spirit rover and Martians!! I saved a copy of the image here in case it's gone by the time you go look. So good.

Update: reader Chris T. writes to point out Google's holiday logo museum, which I wasn't aware of. The rover logo isn't in there yet, but I imagine it will be added.
[megnut]

So simple, just 6 letters, and yet they do such neat things with them. I especially like how they did the 50 years of DNA logo although my favourite is Einsteins birthday.

It didn't

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:23:18 +0000

Google Goes Atom.
Google spurns RSS for rising blog format | CNET News.com. I typically don't pay much attention to the syndication standards wars but this is kind of interesting. Google has gone with the Atom standard instead of RSS for syndication on its Blogger network. Existing Blogger Pro users with RSS feeds can keep them but all other Blogger customers will only be able to deploy Atom feeds.
[High Context]

Sigh

When Atom (ne Echo) was first proposed I said:

"If it means an end to the madness, I'm for it."

It didn't.

All your plumbing belongs to us

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:32:16 +0100

Pandia: "Your site may be banned because someone else has copied it!" [Scripting News]

What disturbed me in reading this was Googles apparent lack of response to questions about this problem. Of course, they're not obliged to answer such questions if they don't want to. But it highlights a mismatch in my mind: Google feels like part of the infrastructure and I'm used to the infrastructure being responsible to us, the users (where our governments haven't sold it out from under us).

Don't be evil (or, at least, don't get caught)

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 22:03:34 +0100

Via Lee Wilkins I've come across FuckedGoogle which is tracking Googles slide into a murky cess pit. It seems like the joys of cashing out over 1.8 billion dollars worth of stock (more than five times the total amount of profit Google has ever made as a business) may have lead some at Google to forget the Don't be evil message.

Here I'm thinking about click through fraud, trademark violation, copyright infringment, and gaming their own search engine. Way to go guys.

TrustRank

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 22:29:09 +0100

The ProBlogger reports that Google have trademarked TrustRank. A search for TrustRank turns up a paper discussing semi-automatable techniques for separating reputable web content from Spam.

It's good, but the price is too high

Fri, 13 May 2005 13:20:12 +0100

Anu's getting fed up with being locked out of his GMail mailbox. Like me he loves the GMail interface but thinks the price may be too high. I've been using GMail for about 8 months and, despite it's flaws, think it's a great interface. But my feelings about Google have gone through an inflection during this time. They're not a company to whom I want to give anything any more. I'm looking out for the company who can eat Google's lunch.

My plan is to move my mail service over to my mattmower.com domain (where it belongs anyway) and use the GMail account as a backup. But I'll sure miss this great web interface.

Enabling web acceleration

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:54:38 +0100

I was just reading about smart spidering (a directed topic-based crawler which uses Bayesian analysis to determine which links to crawl when it expands its search) and the Google Web Accelerator problem drifted into my mind along with a practical solution.

The default behaviour for web accelerator should be to not accelerate pages. Since we have no idea what is safe or not safe on the web this is the only safe choice.

To control acceleration on a page-by-page basis use the meta tag, e.g.

then on a link-by-link basis this can be overridden, i.e.

or

A large class of applications could, very quickly, be using web acceleration safely with the addition of only one meta-tag.

Help! Google have assassinated my blog!!

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 17:42:05 +0000

This isn't good, not good at all. If I do a Google search for myself my weblog no longer appears in the search results!! Last time I checked it was No.1 hit, now it's gone altogether.

I wondered if it was Google wide but Paolo and Ross seem unaffected and there are links from other blogs in the search results. My blog is just gone...

What have I done for Google to single out my blog for special treatment? And how can I make them love me again?

Update: I notice that my blog appears as a result in other searches, e.g. Curiouser and Curiouser!. It occurs to me that my name doesn't appear prominently on the blog and I wonder if a change to Googles algorithms has made this relevant now?

How much less do I exist?

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 11:13:10 +0000

It's depressing. For so long I had come to believe that a search for my name would give my weblog as the No.1 result. But, as I reported at the beginning of November my blog has disappeared from a bunch of search terms. But not all of them.

I tried contacting Google but no response. I can't see any logic to it. For 2 years or more my blog was me as far as Google is concerned. Now it's not and I can't seem to do anything about it.

Yeah it's depressing.

Looking for a helping hand...

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:29:20 +0000

Does anyone know anyone at Google who can help me? I refer to the problem of my blog suddenly and apparently arbitrarily disappearing from the results of a search for "Matt Mower" that I reported in November and confirmed earlier in January. Google don't appear to respond to a message sent via their request form so what the hell are you supposed to do?

It's not like some other Matt Mower suddenly became more relevant than me and knocked me down a peg or two. That I could live with. What has happened is that my blog has just gone and the rest of the search results (which are still primarily about me) have moved up a rung or two.

Since everybody these days equates what's in Google with what exists on the web, Google are effectively saying "This guy's blog doesn't exist." How can this be right? Where was my right of appeal? As a blogger, as a person, this sucks.

Surely there is some kind soul out there who can help me? Please.

So I do exist

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:01:04 +0000

Some interesting things have been discovered since yesterdays post. First Phil Ringnalda has observed that I am still in Googles index. Phil who also suffers from Googlitis but is perhaps a little more sanguine about it observes that

When your weblog is result 151 for your own name as a phrase it feels like you have been disappeared.

He's not wrong. I looked through quite a few pages of results to find my blog but, never guessing it would suddenly be down in the 150's, I obviously didn't go far enough. Still, it is comforting to know that I am still in there somewhere. Thanks for spotting that Phil.

Something I want to clear up about Phil's post is that my weblog was never really here. This is a test weblog I created when I was first tested Squib, long after this problem began. I'm glad Phil pointed to it though because I had understood that Userland would have deleted it by now and I'm a little surprised it's still there. My original weblog was here which does redirect to it's present location.

Over night Terry Frazier emailed to ask whether Googlebot was still indexing my weblog. The answer is that it is, as recently as 4am this morning it went over the entire thing. Good suggestion Ter, but apparently that's not the answer. With reference to a lack of comments on this blog, they will be back soon in some form or other.

Cristian Vidmar thinks I will never get back the No. 1 slot. But Christian seems to be referring to a search for "Matt" where I was never the first hit (nor even on the first page). I'm talking about hits for "Matt Mower". You'll notice that the top for that search are, directly or indirectly, referencing me. Nothing new has become more relevant.

So the situation seems more hopeful. If I'm not in the #1 I am, at least, still there at #151 and Google is crawling my blog regularly. This suggests that I, or somebody, did something to make this happen. If Googlebot keeps visiting then maybe it can be undone.

So I am left trying to understand what caused my downfall and what to do about it. I don't favour a general de-emphasis of weblogs as Christian suggests, it's been two months already surely others would be bemoaning their rotten luck as well?

And why do I think this is very important?

Yahoo, MSN, and Dogpile all put my blog as the #1 hit for "Matt Mower". Yet I never even thought to look and see if it was a general effect. Rightly or wrongly for me, as I suspect for many others, Google *is* search.

More on my Google implosion

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:51:01 +0000

I'm working on the theory that Phil Ringalda is right about Google hating duplicated content. I'm going to try and get the aggregators with copies of my content to stop publishing it and see if that helps to resuscitate me. I never understood the issue until now but I guess this may be an anti-splogging defence.

What really ticks me off though is that I am completely guessing. Google offers me no way to understand what has happened. They may be punishing me for something completely beyond my control and I have no way to tell. The more I learn about Google the more it feels like some kind of Skinner Box gone awry.

So now I am faced with the prospect of attempting to get any aggregators republishing my content to stop. I've the good folks at iaslash.org a polite request that I hope they'll act upon. I'm also trying to get the test blog Phil noticed shut down.

I notice that Phil has been resusciated so maybe, if I can de-duplicate myself, I have the answer.

I'm in freefall

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:11:55 +0000

So I just thought I would check and see how volatile this ranking thing might be. On Monday Phil had me pegged at #151. When I checked on Tuesday I seemed a little higher than that maybe #120'ish. Today I am at #252. I guess the optimist in may says that if you can drop 100 places in two days you can go up 252 places by next Monday.

Here's hoping...

Another ghost in the machine

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:06:23 +0000

Ken Yarmosh is another ghost treading light in Google's index. It looks like Ken talks about much more useful and interesting stuff than I do so it's probably even more frustrating for him.

What I want to ask Google is this: How can it be that a page that no longer mentions me at all is the number one hit for my name?

But of course there is no one at Google to ask.

And our survey says...

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:38:29 +0000

I got my site verified in Google Sitemaps today and it may have an answer for why I'm tanking in the Google rankings:

Apparently I talk a lot of nonsense that nobody thinks is a worth linking to and it just took Google a little while to catch up with me. Not what I was hoping to hear but I guess it's probably true. Two years ago I was pretty focused on personal KM and intranets. These days I just ramble.

Probably my page rank would have suffered less if I had just shut up ;-)

Update: except that Paolo just showed me his PageRank profile from Google Sitemaps and it is identical to mine, and nothing seems to have happened to the standings of his blog.

I guess Google just hates me.

Was it something I said?

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:36:35 +0000

I'm living with the fact that Google have decided my blog is mostly worthless. None of the changes I made to try and address search engine considerations seem to have made the slightest difference.

But now I hear that GTalk is available in the GMail client? News to me. I mean, I don't want it but it would have been nice to be able to turn it down. And, at the weekend, I saw that my Dad's GMail client has a shiny delete button (which I do want). But, no, I don't have one of those either.

What's up Google? Was it something I said?

Googledown

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 23:11:29 +0100

Reading an interesting discussion about whether Google has a business model beyond search. If you look at the traffic picture the news doesn't look good for their diversification strategy. It seems that the more cynical commenters on Internet Outsiders post about Google Spreadsheet agree:

This is nothing more than part of Google's continuing effort to dupe the press and Wall Street into upholding their absurd valuation. They launch a bunch of acquirees (Writely) and poor betas (Talk, Video) while insiders unload as much stock as they possibly can.

Google still hate me so what do I care if their stock tanks in '07?