SLAMBOARD

Jeeves was a fictional character created by what has become an ‘also ran’ in the cut throat business of search. He served a vital purpose to search because he encouraged participation by people who didn’t quite get the concept of search query. His influence is still felt today even though he retired years ago.

When I was checking stats on my environmental blog this morning I saw evidence of this phenomenon. Somebody asked Google what is the best choice for a toilet seat molded wood or plastic? I know that ranking number one for that query is not going to bring me much traffic, but it’s kinda cool that the person posing the question can get a relevant answer. I have to wonder if they got a more relevant answer than they would have if they had used conventional search query logic.

Last Monday, I was on a train reading a newly purchased copy of Death of a Salesman. I can only vaguely remember reading it in school and I was surprised and a bit creeped out at its relevance.

There have been many of Pop Culture References made to this award winning play. I spotted one that hasn’t been cataloged in Wikipedia. One of my least favorite bands, Nickelback, has a song called Leader of Men. One line of lyrics echoes Biff Lomans rebuke of his father’s American Dream.

I am Not a Leader of Men

If Biff and Willy Loman were real, they would probably be a bit disheartened to find that Nickelback has pushed them all the way to the 4th page of a Google query for this line. I know I am.

Death isn’t current enough to be effectively used a metaphor for the American political scene or the present economic crisis but I hope that somebody close to GWB makes some kind of Biff remark that he won’t get.

I have ratcheted down my blogging frequency quite a bit as other aspects of my life and work demand more of my time and energy. I was surprised to see that my blog still ranks quite highly for the search term ‘Kimkins‘ after I have been mostly out of the loop for months.

I guess Google algorithms don’t discount you for being out of the loop.

I am considering outsourcing some of my blogs to my children for the summer, but I will probably hold on to this one because of its relative seriousness. Are there any other bloggers out there who are trying to get their kids into blogging? I have a vague memory of the Family Circus guy getting his kid to draw his daily comic. I don’t know if he really did that or if it was just a creative device design to conceal the fact that he had the shakes.

If you are like me, you don’t use the salad crisper in your refrigerator. The advanced operators on Google are kinda like that. I remember using similar commands when I was doing abstract searches on a cd-rom database at school back in the 80s. I am just mentioning them on here because I figure that there might be a few people like me who didn’t even realize that they were there. I think I might start using the allintitle: operator from time to time.

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.