Harmony returns to the Googleverse
I see that Google has at least partly come back to its senses about where I should appear in a search for phil: after a few months in the outer darkness of the second page I’m back at number 5, with three of the four ahead of me making use of Google’s excessive fondness for the .gov and .edu TLDs.
Note to college students: if you’ve got free web space in .edu, you really should use it for something, since foo.edu/students/stuff/public/~you/there/ may well outrank there.com; however, most universities frown on you using it for a redirect to a pay-per-click pr0n site.
Note for the irony-impaired: there’s really no need to post about my swollen ego and how I’m crowing about my mastery of Google after previously crying about it not ranking me high enough. It should be obvious that Google should rank hundreds of people named Phil higher than me; ironically, they don’t. I search my name because it’s handy: Phil is a common word that I can type quickly, Ringnalda is a rare word that I can still type quickly. Google and its rankings are important to me because for most things any more I just type a word or two in Phoenix’s address bar, and let it send me to Google’s number one result. Simple as that. Nothing to see here but a change in algo, possibly back to what it was before the change in late September.
Google is a strange beast to understand. Mostly because its so dynamic and always changing.
Phil, I’m the third Dave again.
That’s good, but…
with my resolution, font size, and layout, you’re below the fold (and so am I). In your case it’s because they’ve got ”Dave” news which they display at the top of the page. From what I’ve seen watching not-very-serious internet users search Google, being above the fold is a huge advantage: I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars Google News has cost people who were third or fourth for terms that generally have news?
I’m not in even in the top 30 of David’s (David Bowie, David Letterman, David Broder. …) but I finally made it to near the top of the list (3rd) for David Engel. It amazes me because I had in the past always fell below someone working on Debian. Now he’s down at eight (?). Perhaps they’ve thrown in a frequency of update factor or something.
Brought it back, I think. That seemed to be what was putting bloggers so high before: post-9/11 they were trying to be more timely, so they started crawling things that seemed to get updated more frequently more often, and ranking them very high for a short time, and fairly high after that. If you frequently resaid your name, that would just keep putting you near the top of the list. Then this September, probably in part due to launching Google News they cut back on the big ups from freshness, but now (for now, at least: what Google giveth, Google taketh away) they seem to be back to giving out bonuses for updates.
Hi Phil, you are the new number one for this update. It’s google dance time and I checked for your name. Congratulations :) My efforts in climbing up with Gerald as a search-keyword have been successful too – from 100 up to 7.
Regards, Gerald
Addendum: ”Phil” dropped down from first to second position, ”Gerald” climbed up to third position :)
I really can’t complain about being second, since the groundhog is the one I’ve always thought should be first anyway (though I’ll wager he just got a ”fresh” boost from February that’ll go away with another update).
Congratulations on third – that’s a tough league you’re playing in, with a former US President to beat.
Sorry for the duplicate content, but your server gave me an internal server error message. I first checked whether the entry had been postet and as it did not appear I made a second post. Is it possible that the second try made the first one appear?
That’s it exactly – my host likes to kill processes grabbing more memory or CPU than they like, so it sometimes gets killed after the comment has been saved, but before this page is rebuilt, and then when you do the reasonable thing and try again, you end up with both copies (which is no big thing, I’ve gotten so used to it that I automatically check for doubles whenever I see a new comment).