I won't bother promoting Andrew Orlowski's rant about "googlewashing" by linking to it, but the gist of his argument is that blogging gives inordinant amount of power to bloggers in influencing the results that google returns. While his rant was dumb, he is actually onto something.

I just was looking through my web logs to see the referrers, and after doing a bit more digging, it appears my website is the second returned link when doing a google search for "jamband communities". This is because my music page uses those words and because my blog and representive linux work get interlinked throughout the net. Thus, google gives more credence to the words on my site.

If I know I shouldn't be the second result, then google should too. Oddly, this very blog entry may bump my pagerank further. Looks like google's got some perfecting to do.

By Gary at 08:47 PM in Sci/Tech | Comments (2)  

I've been having an experience similar to what you describe here (including wondering how my blog could possibly rank high on *any* search). In my case, the phrase being searched was (is?) one that's apparently well-known in slashdot troll circles. I won't repeat it here, coz you don't want to be linked to for that phrase, I'm sure. :-) Like you, I wonder what this signifies about Google's rankings.

Posted by: mike at January 18, 2004 12:59 PM

haha, it sounds like you're trying to avoid passing on a disease.

Posted by: gary at January 18, 2004 04:45 PM