Asymmetric advantage

Jon Udell has a post about page popularity in Web search engines.  Currently a search for 'Jon' (at least if English is your preferred language) brings him up as the second and tenth entries.  So, I tried searching for 'Thom';  I come up 23rd (OCLC) and 25th (this blog).  Not too bad, but not the first page either.

Lessons that can be drawn from this:

1. Jon Udell is more popular than I am
2. An unusual name, or failing that, spelling helps (I'm not in the first 300 for 'Thomas', but am the 8th 'Hickey' today)
3. The Web is a strange place

I'm certainly not the 8th most important Hickey in history, but I've been doing things on the Web for a long time, OCLC has a decent Web presence and I have a blog that I occasionally post to.  What is asymmetrical about this is that there are lots of corporations much larger than OCLC that have important people named Hickey, but they are just about invisible.  As the Web becomes more and more the way people get information, this can't be helping those companies.

I've noticed the same phenomenon when people leave OCLC and go somewhere else.  Their Web presence completely disappears if they go to a for-profit, and often goes down even if they are at an academic institution.

--Th (currently ranking #1 on Google for 'Outgoing')

Comments

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Last month, I was fifth for my LAST name. with an entry for my blog, and had another mention on the first google page, a couple more on the second, etc. (Forget my first name).

This month, I'm on the second page mentioned on someone elses blog, and my blog isnt' until like the fifth page.

I have no idea what happened. I mean, my blog got more popular, but somehow I was penalized?

In The Future, everyone will be on the first Google page for 15 minutes.

[Jon Gorman]

I've also noticed it's been true for a long time that being associated with software development boosts up your google rank and overall web presence. I agree with John Undell, I think this will drop off over time.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Doctors and English professors aren't necessarily going to spend as much time creating resources that link to each others pages, but it's still pretty trivial for a software engineer to do so. This feeds the Google monster in a variety of ways. Also, software developers just spend more time on the computer than most folks, so even their click-throughs are likely to throw things off. It would be interesting to see population statistics and web engine use by a variety of factors.

[Merrilee Proffitt]

Wow, that's kind of startling -- a search on my name comes up with my super outdated homepage as the first result, and other pages related to me come up below that. Merrilee Rush (Angel of the Morning fame) comes up further down.

[Roy Tennant]

I come up at about item #11 (second page, but advertising gets in the way), for a search on "Roy". But oddly enough, the results are slightly different whether you search on "roy" or "Roy". Go figure.

[walt crawford]

Hmm. #6 under "walt" (which surprises me), around #50 and #51 under "crawford" (and I expected even lower)...and #1-7 under walt crawford without quotes.

So I'm going to disappear in October, when I leave OCLC? Could happen, I suppose...or maybe not.