Friday, August 16, 2002

Digression 6.01: A strange one While checking to see if the count for Phragmipedium kovachii had gone up in Google today, I noticed that my blog no longer appears....Go figure.....there goes my experiment!! In addition, the count remains at 33 despite my reference not being there. Later today, the count dropped to 29 and my site reappeared!!!!!!! Mysterious Google.... 10:06:22 PM    comment []

From Tyromaniac: My brother the Tyromaniac still finds time to blog and look for interesting articles while on vacation in S.F., like the one he posted today by Paul Graham on blocking spam. While filtering should work, I still think that only those that are not uncomfortable with reading the term Bayesian statistics, will trust a filtering system. It will be like the fear of using credit cards online, its irrational, but in the back of their minds the common user will always wonder whether that one once-in-a-lifetime all-important you-are-a-winner e-mail is being blocked by the filtering. 9:56:30 PM    comment []

Digression 6: Blogging and Google: Is it good, fast or both?   When I wrote Digressions 5 and 5.1, I was aiming it as a general comment on our planet and an interesting bit of information on orchids and species to those that know little about the topic. Today, I noticed that I had a surprising number of referrals early in the day and when I looked at the referers I was also surprised to find that they were mostly (80%) coming from google, but no other search engine. Thus, I decided to perform an experiment to try to answer the question of whether google is simply good, fast in time or simply both. I will repeat the experiment at a later date to test whether time is the important variable or not. I did two searches and the results are posted below. First I searched for my blog, simply searching for The Devil’s Excrement (D.E) in a variety of search engines. Then I searched for the term Phragmipedium kovachii (P.K.) and recorded how many times that searched engine found it and whether my blog was recorded or not.                Engine   D.E.   P.K.     (site)   (# of times)           Google   Yes   33           Yahoo   Yes   18           M   No   12           H   N   12           A   N   5           AJ   N   0                                               Clearly, Google is much superior. I understand Yahoo uses Google, but it is clearly programmed differently. The question to me is then whether Google is better or faster. It appears to be both, as the discovery of the orchid Phragmipedium Kovachii has been around longer than my site (12 days) or my posts on the discovery (4 days), while the report of the discovery of the orchids is almost two months old (June 18th.). A separate explanation might be that Google has some sort of special cataloguing for blogs that simply distorts my conclusions. I will revisit the searches in one month or so to try to clarify these issues.   Obviously by now my own experiment has affected my numbers, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work in experimental blogging, cool!!!!!   9:31:18 AM    comment []