Troubling Search Engines

How search engines work, is a guarded secret for the Tech Aristocracy. One of the things they really don't want you to do, is figure it out! So I think there are certain levels of randomness to it. "So how is anybody suppose to find anything?" is a very HARD question to answer, and the bane of any NEW business putting up a website.

One of the things you find out very quickly by searching your own name, is just how many doppelgangers, you have. What you thought was your unique identity as a person often isn't! Particularly in Tech these days. And this is true, even with the less common names. Just a WHOLE bunch of people in this world, which is making the rock under our feet smaller all the time. You might not be cut from a cookie cutter, but betcha you can find somebody with your name, in your field, that ain't you, very soon, if not already! My group of close friends, have been in the programming business for 30 years, and we all have doppelgangers now, according to the search engines.

Now why that other Randy Smiley's Classmates account is more popular than mine to Google, I have no idea (but I kind of like it that way)? Maybe he pays for his? I'm too cheap and antisocial for that. But that's another topic, all together.

One of the most puzzling things to me, is that my Blog is hidden when you search 'Randy Smiley', but my friend's follower's page comes right up??????????? ?????? The BLOG doesn't, but looking over somebody else shoulder does????? How annoying is that? I think it's a bug in Blogger, I really do.

I found it puzzling as well, that my article "An abusive relationship", showed up on searches within minutes, and today has completely disappeared? Google can be fickle. And maybe some keywords, trigger flags with them for human examination (by their staff), I think? And you thought it was just in China? (Update:) Blogger requires being tickled within a certain time period. This article showed up right away too, while all others have faded off. Clearly Google rewards you for posting to Blogger, with new material all the time.

RandySmiley.COM was taken down for a while, and parked, because of a hacker trying to get it banned, for bad-ware (which he planted into my page). And in a way he succeeded, in that I'm no longer on the search list because of moving it into parking lots. So sometimes you just can't win on these things. And there is some kind of seniority involved in how often you are scanned by the engines, that I may have given up.

Meanwhile, none of the Engines today, seem to be leading with the normal direct websites. Which is quite odd? Tells me there was some kind of roll out (or roll back), that we might not be aware of. Which makes it even harder to answer your question; "How can anybody find me?"

I don't know!

(Update:) According to my expert, websites show up based on being linked to other websites. So starting yourself a free blog, and linking to yourself, might not be all that bad an idea. He also provided us with this Google link.

On websites, all I can advise is setting those Keywords in the header of your page, and then making sure there are no errors on the page. Both Firefox and IE will make note of errors on a page, so click that little icon and find out what they don't like, and fix it, if it gets flagged! Doing that one little thing, did improve my placement in the lists, a bunch. My error was so small, that not many tools caught it!