Google Fun

[Hal Duston]

On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 08:40, Brian Densmore wrote:
> Not necessarily true. You can pay Google to
> have your webpage turn up higher on the search result list.

Yes, this is true, although the links are clearly marked as 
sponsored links.  I automatically skip over the stuff in the 
pastel boxes at the top, as well as the pastel boxes at the 
right.

> Although, I think this particular result is at the top 
> due to corporate culture at Google. I seem to remember 
> the CEO

It's a "googlebomb" plain and simple.  Try "miserable failure".
George W. Bush's bio page on whitehouse.gov is the first link.
Jimmy Carters' bio page on whitehouse.gov is the second link.
Michael Moore's website is the third link.
Hillary Clinton's senate website is the fourth link.
A BBC article about this googlebomb is the fifth link.

> making some statement about that page some time ago, when
> some other company was complaining about how Google gives
> priority to some pages over others. So, yes you can pay 
> Google

Yes, google does give priority to some pages over others.  When 
I type in "Restaurants Kansas City", I would hope that it would 
actually give priority to pages about restaurants in Kansas City.  
The primary complaints I've heard about priorities is from folks 
who think that when you type in a corporate name, you should get 
links to websites critical of that company rather than the 
company's own website.

> to make your page the page that always get returned by a 
> certain search when hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button. 
> On a more personal 

"I'm feeling lucky" just takes you directly to the top 
non-"Sponsered link".  Nothing more, nothing less.

> note, I get the distinguished honor of being able to tell 
> people to type in my name "Brian Densmore" and hit the 
> "I'm feeling lucky" and they will find a page about me. Granted 
> it will likely be a link to the KCLUG archives or some page on 
> another site ripped from the KCLUG archives.  Yes, people have 
> been copying KCLUG pages and archiving them elsewhere on the web. 

I looked through all 96 links returned for "Brian Densmore" and 
found no KCLUG archives that are stored on any other machine.  
The yvca.org links are from when apache was not properly 
configured and yvca.org was mistakenly using the kclug.org 
directory.  Yes both kclug.org and yvca.org are hosted on the 
same machine.

> Brian

--
Hal