The leftward and other blatherings of Span (now with Snaps!)

Monday, April 04, 2005

strange bedfellows

People find this site through the weirdest of ways.

Case in point:
spanblather is currently the number four hit on google (the web not just NZ) for NZ Police Force Jobs

Now I have to say that while some people might think that in Days Gone By I was quite interested in creating more work for the NZ police I must say I was somewhat surprised at this result.

And yet when I did a search for left wing blog I scanned futilely through over 50 pages of results and didn't see a single URL that is on my left blog roll.

So my question is - how the hell does Google work out its rankings?

And do you other bloggers get such damn strange search results??

10 comments:

Asher said...

I'm high up on Google searches for Cuba Carnival, Cultural Zionism, Channel Z and Kiwi FM...thats good for me, especially the cultural Zionism one.

Amanda said...

I get a number of hits from people searching for How to make tea or other tea related quests.

I'm top of the google rankings for Make Tea Not War and get a hits from that which I think is probably a disappointment for those googlers. As far as I'm concerned the blog name references the Monty Python Hells Grannies skit but apparently, which I didn't know when I picked it, the British anti war activist movement used it as a slogan against the war in Iraq.

Nigel Kearney said...

The exact workings of google are a secret but a lot of it is related to links.

It's not just the words on your page but the words people use when they link to your page. So titles of posts are important.

If you were to rename your blog to something like 'NZ Left Blog' and people put that in their blogroll your google rank would go way up.

I always try to blogroll people using their name if I know it, otherwise unscrupulous people like David Farrar who name their blog 'Kiwi Blog' will get a huge google rank.

Apathy Jack said...

Well, Brainstab is number one on Google for searches of 'minge stab', and pretty high up on Yahoo for searches of 'throat rape', or so they tell me.

And just yesterday, someone found the site for the first time by typing into google: 'i loved that goddamn elephant' Which makes me happy.

Span said...

well today i discovered i am ranked #10 on Google for tamihere maori-bashing - that's before I posted about the current situation.

i am not enough of a techie as yet to know how to search caches etc so an explanation that i can understand would be much appreciated :-)

and Mr Thomas, you know deletions just make me more curious!

Apathy Jack said...

Nah, that was just me - Ben has some manner of default login thing set up on my computer for blogger, so my post went under his name. My attempts to delete it the first time just ended up havning it posted again... So, both me.

Rich said...

Google can/will tweak their algorithm to compensate for the interlinked nature of blogs - they do after all own Blogger.

I suspect, but have no evidence, that PageRanks greater than five or so are conferred manually rather than by any algorithm.

Rich said...

That's because the SE can't distinguish between a single article and a blog page with dozens of articles. Your page has all the words and lot's of instances of New Zealand - with a pagerank of 2 the aggregate gets you to #8.

Unfortunately, Google is designed by PhDs so a lot of real world things like that escape them - the one that anoys me is the high ranking they give to directory sites with minimal value add.

Span said...

thanks, it is making more sense now.

now if someone could explain what Googlebombing, or Googlewhacking, means, then I will have learned my requisite Thing For Today (unfortunately not before breakfast).

Span said...

cheers Greg, that makes sense. we should start a secret VLWC to further these kinds of things...