Another <Google> loser heard from

Because it lacked the all-important feature of being about me, me, me, I’d forgotten that I wasn’t the only one getting unpersoned by Google: Matt Mower doesn’t exist either.

The situation isn’t quite as bad as he thinks: in fact, he shows up in [“Matt Mower”], it’s just that when your weblog is result 151 for your own name as a phrase it feels like you’ve been disappeared.

Hmm. Moved from one URL to another (and worse yet, the old one doesn’t redirect to the new), content republished by at least one aggregator which doesn’t decline to be indexed by search engines. Sounds pretty familiar to me.

I’d say the one difference is that Matt cares and I don’t, but if (MS employee) Duncan Mackenzie is going to have trouble finding me again because I’m not indexed in MSN Search unless you already know my URL… well, now you’re starting to get into “actually does matter to me” territory.

17 Comments

Comment by Mark #
2006-01-09 16:27:59

And then, on the extreme end, is Scoble (it’s amazing how many sentences start that way, but never mind that), who seems to be determined to dominate the top 10 results for his name by moving to yet-another-domain-that-isn’t-his every year. (NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a weblog to a domain that you don’t control., but never mind that either.)

To which we apparently need to add ”and NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a full-content feed.” Or reorganize your site by employing fundamental web standards. I wonder whether you would have been better off using META refreshes on all your old pages…

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2006-01-09 17:07:49

The nice thing about having changed my prefs to get 100 results per page at Google (so it’s quicker to get down to where we losers hang out) is that you get to see even more fun: I love the result for The Economist’s profile of Scoble down at result 22: title ”Skip” description ”Skip.”

I guess some people don’t worry about how search engines see them.

 
 
Comment by Kafkaesquí #
2006-01-09 23:22:11

So let’s see…I can remember your name, but I can’t recall your url? Yeah, sounds like a technical problem.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2006-01-09 23:56:20