Interesting ways psychoastronomy shows up in search engines
In which I occasionally note some odd or interesting ways psychoastronomy.org, my personal homepage, is represented within the big commercial search engines whose robots have been its most faithfully returning visitors.

• muvies on google,  striperella on google
  Misspellings of common words, common misspellings at least, are a fast path to high pagerank. These two keywords are responsible for dozens upon dozens of clicks on our site coming from google. My "muvies" blog is toprated for its name, and tracy's blogpost about stripperella (its correct spelling), in which she misspelled it striperella, is third ranked for search phrase "striperella"
• virality on google
  Well, my "virality experiment" (see below) had mixed results in terms of generating "free" clicks for my 3dchris image. On the one hand, the page didn't take off like wildfire and become the friendster of animated-gif 3d imagery. On the other, long after I turned off my google ads, and long after the slashdot effect has trickled almost (but not quite!) to zero, I still get a few random clicks a day on that page, enough to make it my most popular (1500 views so far, a bit less than half without google or slashdot as referrer). From where? I don't know, because they tend not to have referrers. A side note, and the point of this entry, is that this page right here, as a result of my ground breaking experiment, is very highly ranked by google as relevant to the search term "virality" - no, not first, not even first page. But second page, 11th out of 543 results.
• sofia coppolla on google.
  Have I totally lost the plan? Is it of absolutely no interest that my 2-week-old when-i-feel-like-it movie blog, muvies, is now the top result on google for a common misspelling of Sofia Coppola's name? Or, OOPS! Was? Now the muvies blog seems to have disappeared completely from the googledex. Have I angered the gods?
  
• Not really a search (Slashdot)
  More on the 3d chris thingie. Reed IM'd me earlier today that there was a 3d related posting on slashdot and that I should post to it (someone had already posted some related 3d images), so I did, and included a link to my 3d picture. Didn't get modded very high ("2, funny"), but got a ton of hits anyway - 405 so far. Point being, see the next post - my "virality experiment," in which I paid google $20.65 for 413 hits, so far. So does that mean that when you post a link to Slashdot for free, that they're leaving $20 on the table? Another oddness: I put that link up on my site (and placed the google ads) on July 30. On July 31, Metafilter posted a thread about someone else doing the same thing we were (but much better! ;)). Then today (Aug 13), the same link posted on slashdot. We discovered this thing by total chance! Then our two favorite blogs started yabbering about it right away. Reed said "it's a meme!"
• Google AdWords keyword: 3D
  My co-workers and I made this cool 3d image of myself and I decided to put it on my website and, obsessive weirdo that I am, put an ad on google for it. I bought the keyword "3d" and got a couple hundred clicks at a nickle apiece, setting me back some $7.45 so far. My hope was to investigate the nature of virality on the web. This was a pretty cool picture. Could I get people emailing to each other and stuff? For that price, I got about 407 clicks on the site. Only 284 were directly from google, so that works out to a VI (virality index) of 1.433. I don't know if that's good. A lot of people emailed it around, even someone in Australia, and one person even put it on their blog!
• tracy rolling on google.
  Tracy was complaining to me the other day that she felt lame because her name didn't show up on google. Later I linked to her blog from my blog, which is linked from my homepage. Now her blog is top ranked for her name. I almost hesitate to mention this here, because now this page will get a high pagerank for this search. If it does, maybe the following sentencce will make up for it. Tracy rolling is the coolest person in the world.
• chris marstall on google.
  Well, the new index keeps my fotolog as the top two pages. To wit, the first is 'www.fotolog.net/marstall' and the second is the same url with a slash at the end. That seems unworthy of google now, doesn't it? In another example of sheerly banal search-circularity, the precis offered for the second fotolog link includes the posting my friend Matt Fiveash made to me. The irony? It was a getting-back-in-touch message, in lieu of email, that happened because Matt googled me and this was the top link. There ya go.
  Second oddness here: A few weeks ago I posted a short story I wrote, "The Blue Note," to the homepage. I put it in two parts, 90% in the first and the last few paragraphs in the second. That way I could spy on my server logs and see if anyone had read through the whole thing. Well, the second page of this story is second in rank to fotolog, higher that the first page! It's kind of neat, though, that the precis neatly includes the first bit of text of the story as an enticement.
  Third oddness, most dispiriting: psychoastronomy.org, the homepage now appears nowhere near the top in rank for this search (my name). How could this be? Before, it was second after my fotolog. What on earth should I change to alter this?
  
• psychoastronomy on google.
  It's so much fun when a new crawl of your world makes it up on google. That happened today, or at least I noticed it today. Karen Armstrong is no longer in the mix for this primal search, and my homepage has beaten out QuickTopic altogetherin terms of relevance to 'psychoastronomy.' I wonder why? The most interesting thing, though? Second most relevant page to psychoastronomy is this one right here, the one you're reading ... go figure, a wheel within a wheel. Pretty average stuff, I guess.
• heath leyden on google.
  It is the top-ranked site for this search phrase. These are two farming and logging towns right next to each other in Western Mass., near the Vermont border. They are each about the size of Manhattan, and doubtlessly have been paired together in uncounted recorded contexts. A few months ago I went to one, then the other, in search of a country cabin, and posted photos for my friends and family to see. Little did I know I would rewrite their very semantics in so doing.
• "adam ferrara" on yahoo.
  OK, I have been known to obsessively comb through my access.log; today I found an entry with this link as its referer. Explanation: about a month ago I went to see Adam Ferrara perform and mentioned it in my blog. Apparently this is enough to give me the 162nd most relevant page to this funnyman. And apparently someone clicked through 8 pages of results and chose my blog to click on! This must be the Joy of Blogging.
• psychoastronomy on google.
  This one says a little about PageRank. As a joke, I made up a couple of QuickTopic discussion boards - one called "psychoastronomy" and the other "psychoastronomy vs. karen armstrong." No-one really ever posted to them, yet google thinks they are more relevant to psychoastronomy than the font of all psychoastronomy, psychoastronomy.org! Apparently this is because the domain quicktopic.com has a high overall ranking.
• chris marstall on google.
  This is what reed refers to as the "fotolog effect" and is similar to what happened with quicktopic. Not only is my fotolog higher than my own homepage in relevance to my name as a keyphrase, but it also beat out the other Chris Marstall, who has always beaten me out previously. Presumably because so many bloggers and homepages link to their fotolog, not to mention a grand total of 4 New York Times articles.