Maddenation
Google, Searches, Justice
A while back, Dad emailed me about people suing Google because their search-engine rankings fell and they lost business. Often this happened after they had paid some third party to massage their ranking upward (by tricking Google for a short while). Of course, I thought it was ridiculous that people would sue, but, hey, this is America!
And Google is in the news again, at Salon.com for much the same thing (you may have to click on some link to watch a short commercial before you can read the whole article, but it’s basically painless). Dang complicated this search-engine-rankings war. From that article, I followed a link to one on Google bombs, which are when a group of bloggers (which we’re now a part of, even if on the fringe, living by ourselves) group-links to something. Kind of funny, kind of scary. Especially when you read, at the end of the article, that Microsoft recently released a crawler to map the web, and that’s the first step in beginning a search engine service.
By the way, a search for patrick madden (without quotes) gives my Ohio U English Department page in third place, and Maddenation in sixth (with Dad’s entry on mundane things), and Dad’s essay “A Song for Mom” from Notre Dame Magazine in tenth. Putting “patrick madden” in quotes gives the same top ten results, but with another quote (from Dan asking for help on his nametag project) excerpted. Hmm.
A search for madden (without quotes, but you wouldn’t need them anyway) does not give any page related to any of us within the first 100 results. Lots of John Madden (and his video game) and Steve Madden shoes, and then a lot of interesting things our possible distant relatives are doing.
A search for “karina madden,” with quotes, shows our Karina at #1, some other woman from Pittsburgh in two spots, and maybe an alumna from the National College of Ireland. Interesting. There’s more than one in the world.
Patrick • News • 07/01/03 • 2 comments
Comments
Patrick • 05/10/04 • 6:53 PM:If you search Google for patrick madden today, I’m up to number two, but unfortunately, it’s a link to the old page of mine here at Ohio U, and I haven’t yet figured out how to do a server redirect to get to my new page (though I will, soon). Weird is that number eight (not counting a double one) is for maddenness, which doesn’t have my name on it anywhere at all (nor does it have “madden” even. How does Google know it’s me!?
Dad • 05/10/04 • 11:26 PM:I contend that the “maddenness” hit is really me, because I get the letters from the domain regestry at my address (postal). Maybe google knows it’s us by the same method the domain registry folks tracked you down a while ago. Anyway, it’s still spooky.
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