Google’s crush on me has lessened somewhat – I’m not in the top ten results for ‘morgue’ any more – but it isn’t gone. (It doesn’t leave anonymous love notes in my locker any more, but it still writes ‘google 4 morgue 4 eva’ on the odd toilet wall.)
And a side effect of this is that some of my blog posts turn up really easily for people who might not be so happy about that.
For example, google ‘David Capitanchik’ and results 1 and 2 are posts of mine deriding prime nutbar David Capitanchik for some particularly boneheaded commentary on the risks of terrorism in the UK. (One of them is even entitled Capitanchik suxxor!) The man himself only turns up as result 3. Man, that’s cool. That’s kinda like victory.
My post on Monday about 8 Tribes is fourth on the google results for that search term. Not very complimentary about it, either.
I come 9th on searches for ‘Wellington Bypass’ – for linking to another blogger, as it happens.
So that’s quite nifty. Right now, for stuff at a certain level of obscurity, I can get some wicked Google impact. How can I use this power for good?
And, while I’m wondering, how can I avoid using this power for EVIL? For example, anyone googling ‘ernesto’s wellington’ will get my Ernesto – Disapppointing post first out of the box (and a bit further down if the apostrophe is skipped). That feels kinda bad. I went in there a couple times, and it did disappoint me, but that’s mostly because it’s a restaurant not a cafe. And, a lot of the concerns in that first post have been dealt with, like the table layout. I am misleading teh world! Should I really be feeling guilt about this? Well, probably not, because according to Sitemeter only one person has searched on those words in the last month. But. I guess, with great power, comes great responsibility…
And, er, coming second for searches on ‘childrape’ doesn’t exactly make me comfortable either. But if someone has to search for that term, my carefully-considered post about censorship might as well be what they see…