 A recent report says
that Google, in order to try to beat back growing
competition from other search engines (wonder why that
might be necessary?), has added a billion pages to what it spiders,
from 3.3 to 4.3 billion pages. Most notably, it's spidering a lot more
images -- doubling its count to almost a billion. The results are quite
bizarre. The Raven, whose wonderful writing ceased a half year ago, has
suddenly jumped up in the rankings again, with over two thirds of his
400-some hits per day coming from Google Image searches, virtually all
of them clearly in search of porn. The Raven was always discreet and
tasteful, but not afraid to lampoon trashy contemporary culture, so his
searchers must almost undoubtedly leave disappointed, though slightly
better informed.
And Standing Room Only's
Hugh Elliott, back to his thoughtful and literate blog after a lengthy
hiatus, himself laments that his recent surpassing of the 100,000 hit
mark was 'empty and meaningless' and due mainly to people looking for
porn. In fact, since the Google 'upgrade', one of Hugh's pictures,
posted a year ago, called 'porn.jpg' has, all by itself, upped Hugh's
hit count by close to 700 hits per day. And the picture isn't even
pornographic, and it doesn't even appear on the first results page when
you do an Image Search for 'porn'! Hugh deserves better. Go visit his
blog for some fine writing, and especially check out his fiction
archives.
All this explains why, although Google has finally got around to
spidering about half my old pages since my blog revamp (and you know
who I can thank for that), my hit count has only risen by a measly 50
hits/day.
So here's an experiment, with four points: See the picture above?
Tasteful eh? I dedicate it to Presnit Bush's outrageous new plan to
legitimize discrimination in the US Constitution. Guess what I've named
the picture? The points:
- I'll change the name of the picture to something
untitillating in a few days, and track how much of an impact it makes
on my daily hit count and ranking. Prepare for one of my snazzy,
heart-breaking charts.
- We definitely need some better measures of blog popularity
than hit counts. Number of inbound links and RSS feed subscriptions are
better, but they only tell part of the story. Hey Radio Userland, how
about equipping Radio 9.0 users with an automatic hitmeter, that separates
out search engine hits from real
hits, and shows a trendline?
- There's too many people out there looking for porn, when
they should be reading about all the terrible things going on in the
world, and how to fix them. And then
going looking for porn to take their minds off it. If you came here
looking for porn, GET A LIFE, DUDE, and by the way
there are way better ways of finding it than using Google. Do some
research! And thanks for coming by and upping my hit count. Bye now.
- If the picture offends you, ask yourself why.
Oh, and just for good measure: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ
already qualifies as the worst movie ever made. Two relentless hours of
torture and brutality, violence purely for shock effect, religious
revisionism, anti-Semitism, oceans of blood, manipulative sadism, and
more whipping and flogging than Caligula.
Have I seen it? Of course not. Waste money on the most inevitably bad
movie since that equally wacko religious cultist John Travolta made the
almost as awful Battlefield Earth,
when the competent critics are unanimous that it is 'loathsome'? I just
want to see what mention of this mindless drivel does to my Google
count while I'm attracting the uncreative porn-seekers.
Back to my usual serious posts tomorrow.
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11:47:30 AM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
