Some Examples

Ev took my previous statements to task, and I do admit I was light on examples. I was seeing my own site in search after search but didn't bother to document them. Typepad offers a nice stat and referrer interface, so I just took a peek to grab some examples of what I was talking about. These aren't my searches, but instead what people search for online and end up on my site. The following is a list of every search referrer that lead to the site for the past 2 hours (from 4:30PM to 6:30PM 7/23/03), keeping in mind that tomorrow the site is officially one week old:

tivo phone prefix
phillips dsr 7000 #1 and I barely mentioned it
tivo hack service call
hacking tivo series 2 another number 1
phillips dsr 7000 hard drive number 1 again
tivo series 2 setup network modem
hacking tivo I don't see the site in these listings, though in the first few pages I noted lots of blogs
phillips dsr 7000 "home media" the only result
phillips dsr 7000
tivo dialing ethernet
phillips dsr 7000 support #1 result, and it leads to the front page instead of a post
linux pvr

Some of the posts on the PVRblog are helpful to the search terms being used here, but I would say the many (half? the majority?) aren't that useful.

Do I hate blogs? Of course not, but I've been doing lots of research online recently (about music, elections, mortgages, and gadgets), and blogs are showing up for all sorts of things, and they're not always helpful or directly related to the information I'm seeking. And again, i don't think blog authors are doing it consciously, and I don't think Google is favoring blogs for any special reason besides they happen to have all the properties of a great indexable site. I didn't set out to give the blog haters credit for "ruining google," I'm just making an observation here that I can no longer ignore. I love Google and it's by far the best research tool out there, I just hope it can stay that way, especially when the flood of new users from services like AOL Journals start going online by the thousands.