Get a Cloogle

I may not fawn over them like so many media hacks, but one must admit that Google did revolutionize search with a very simple concept: relevance matters.

So what is going on now? I regularly run a search to see how their rankings are changing over time and qualitatively evaluate how they're doing. My control term is naturally, my name, "Russell Dicker", leaving out the quotes.

Over time I've seen my Amazon.com profile and my 43 Things Places People profile trade places along with a number of other things that made some level of sense. The current results however cannot be described as anything but rank stupidity.

Let's dissect their search results:

First up is a blog post about using the word 'whore' and its derivations in Amazon.com reviews.¹ In the comments, an angry customer posts an off-topic and woefully inaccurate depiction of a time I tried to personally help him. The combination means the first thing popping up on Google when searching for my name is "The Whore of Amazon.com". Charming.

Amusing but unflattering allusions to a secondary source of income aside, does this site really deserve to be number on for that search term? My first name appears five times, my surname eight, and five times they appear in succession. Not bad, but it never appears in any sort of markup and the page hasn't been updated in over a year. What about links? According to Google there are 0 links to that page.

Anyone can make a mistake, so what is second? Up next is an article from 1999 that embarrassingly tried to claim my father and I as the first .com dynasty.

While I blissfully remember the halcyon days of my fleeting membership in the .com paper millionaire club, this doesn't seem to be the most relevant item about me either. It has my first name five times, my last name seven, but only together once. Again there is no markup around the usage. This time the page manages to pull in a single measly link, but there haven't been any updates in nearly seven years.

The next few listings are the to-be-expected profiles on Amazon.com and 43 things. We also have the unexpected link to my single experimental entry on Erik Benson's Morale-O-Meter.

So where is this fine piece of writing with 10 instances of my first name, twice with my surname in markup, countless links to other pages with my name, two inbound links, and regular updates?

It is three quarters of the way down the third page, behind a gaggle of links where my names never appear together and, my personal favorite, a hit on an incorrect spelling of my name halfway down page two:

Far be it from me to predict Google's demise based on this one search result. After all, search is legitimately a hard problem. But I do wonder what my friends over in Redmond have as a top search result for me?

[1] The same site also contains another hit for my name which requests that I stop Googling myself. I honestly never went to that site before the page was up. The gentleman only assumed it was me doing the Googling for the name Russell Dicker. Hey Angelina Jolie, stop Googling for pictures of yourself naked!

Comments

[mmmm hmmm]

MSN's results are good, especially when you note that both "Cavalcade of dickheads" and "erectile dysfunction" show up on the first page.

[Jacobim]

Except now it would appear that the wayward puppy received another incoming link. I wonder if he will now show up and start posting clever comments.

[rdicker]

Luckily the "Calvalcade of Dickheads" post is about Russell Crowe. Who can argue with that?

[Sean]

Sadly nothing clever…

Unfortunate googling results indeed – I dug through the archived and took your name out of the comments though as I of course wasn’t making any judgment on what you may or may not do after work. So hopefully eventually google will stop saying such unflattering things about you. And also sorry for the googling yourself thing – you are right it was an assumption… although it was furthered by the fact that Cathy Ceely really does Google herself constantly it seems. And maybe look into possible stalkers because you are a popular search term…

Cheers,
Sean