{"id":628,"date":"2006-10-26T22:11:35","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T06:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=628"},"modified":"2006-10-26T22:27:11","modified_gmt":"2006-10-27T06:27:11","slug":"grandstanding-to-drive-up-his-ratings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=628","title":{"rendered":"Grandstanding to drive up his ratings?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Doc Searls<\/a> was first telling me about blogging, he asked if I wanted to see something incredible.  Then he typed the word “doc” into a certain search engine, and the first or second result was the address of his blog. <\/p>\n

I was amazed.  He was right up there.  On a level with the Department of Communications.  He still is today (try it!)<\/a><\/p>\n

So a while ago, I decided to check out the results for “Kim”.  Narcissistic? I guess.  And worse, the kind of thing that irreversibly links your identity to the audit trail of your searches. <\/p>\n

But I was curious.<\/p>\n

Let's face it.  As I've said before, this blog is the “hair on the end of the long tail.”  It was obvious I wouldn't be in the same league as Doc. And we all know the entire country of Korea has the name ‘Kim’.  One search engine lists 227 million references.  So my hopes weren't high.<\/p>\n

But despite all this, the results were pretty amazing: <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Better<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Was it possible?  I beat out Kim Jong-il, president of North Korea, who came in at number 8.  In fact I easily passed him at 5!  I could see he's maybe not the most popular person in the world, but still, he does run a country, a country much discussed in some circles.  Anyway, I decided to check out a competing engine:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Canadian<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not quite as good, maybe, but hey, Rudyard Kipling and Kim Basinger are certainly both more fundamentally accessible than identityblog (!), so it seems right.<\/p>\n

Anyway, over time I came to take this state of affairs pretty much for granted.<\/p>\n

But last week, visiting Canada, a friend asked me what would happen if he just searched for ‘Kim’, so I told him to try it.  He went to www.google.ca<\/a>, and to my horror I could see that I had slipped<\/em>: <\/p>\n

\"American<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Suddenly the reality of the situation sank in.  Was the underground nuclear test that Kim Jong-il set off just grandstanding intended to increase his search engine ranking?  <\/p>\n

Had Kim Basinger and I actually been in grave danger all along for thwarting a dictator's desire to appear at the top of a result set? <\/p>\n

The poor helpless souls in some CNN documentary flashed before my eyes, and I acepted that losing out to Jong-il wasn't all bad.<\/p>\n

And then the kicker.  I VPNed to a computer back in the States, so I could get to the US versions of the search engines (on my friend's ISP it was impossible to get to the actual “.com” site rather than “.ca”).<\/p>\n

Guess what? Back in the States it was business as usual.  Kim Basinger and I were still up ahead of Jong-il, despite all of his antics.  My friend and I had been looking at a rating that was somehow Canada specific.<\/p>\n

I guess that for search engine experts all of this would come as no surprise.  But I am pretty curious about how these international variations in ranking come about.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was the underground nuclear test that Kim set off just grandstanding intended to increase his search engine ranking?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}