Monday, December 11, 2006

Yet another idiot - and some other stuff...

First - after almost three weeks of silence I'm back. I was pretty busy, and not only had no time to post something interesting - I've also had no time even to read comments. When yesterday I've got at last a couple of minutes to check what's going on, I discovered that my blog was infested with spam comments. Speaking frankly, I don't understand the purpose of spamming blogs with totally unrelated comments - most probably they will be deleted almost immediately, and would only annoy people. (One of the comments I deleted was from "a 15 y.o. Sandra from Arabia" who learns English and wants to talk to boys - I have no clue what was the idea of this, since the comment had no other information). Anyway, I tried to delete as much of this garbage as possible, and I've turned CAPTCHA on - sorry for the inconvenience, but I need no more spam, thank you very much.

Now, about an idiot. Here's a funny story: a blogger received an e-mail from somebody with quite a request:

I have been running the site for over two years and we have been ranked very highly for the search term [edited].

On Thursday morning I checked our google positions and your site is now above us for this term. I haev checked your blog and it has nothing to do with [edited], so I think it would be best all round if you remove your blog from google for this search term.




You can read the rest of the e-mail here, and a follow-up here.

Well, of course we have an exemplary case of an idiot here. Funny, amusing - but not too interesting. What is interesting, though, is the entire situation with businesses (both large and small) striving for the first place in Google searches. It's obvious that the first place is extremely valuable in terms of business. However, this precious commodity is not for sale (which is good!), and is being granted by Google's system based on some mysterious factors. For example, as for today, if you try to search Google for "buy computers", the first place will be occupied by BestBuy. It is followed by buy.com - and CompUSA is on the tenth place, last on the first page. Google in this case becomes something like a blind force of nature - powerful and unpredictable. I am not saying that this is bad - or good - I just find it to be curious and thought-provoking...

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