Look at these search results, according to Sitemeter, for a search that linked to my blog yesterday for the words "the graveyard book silas vampire":
Out of 1,250,000 results, why does my blog come up second?
It's like how sometimes when I feel unloved and I search for me and Google will say something like, "Results 1 - 10 of about 147,000 for effinglibrarian."
And I say, there's no freaking way that effinglibrarian appears 147,000 times on the Internet. I know I've tried to get my name known, but I only type about twenty words a minute, so I don't know how I could get 147,000 effinglibrarians out there on all the internets without a million monkeys helping me type.
I think the answer is that Google is testing a new algorithm that identifies each of us and periodically returns search results tailored to what it thinks we expect to find.
Do a search for yourself one day and Google will use its standard search algorithm to find standard results. But do that same search a different day, and Google will run its special beta algorithm and return results that it thinks you want. Then it looks to see what you do next. If you click on page after page of results, it assumes you, the person, are somehow related to those results since you read through more of them than a casual searcher might. And Google learns from this and becomes smarter.
Well, anything we can do to make Google more powerful, I guess is good for all of us in the long run.
Unrelated.
I want to see someone write an updated Fahrenheit 451 where the Internet is forbidden and instead of characters memorizing books, they memorize search results. So the character who memorizes a search for me will say, "Results one through ten of about one hundred forty-seven thousand for effinglibrarian. One: the.effing.librarian. Effinglibrarian dot blogspot dot com. Two: effinglibrarian on Technorati..."
Needless to say, I want to be the guy who memorizes the search results for "boobs." Especially the image results. I guess I should get started now.
