Friday, April 11, 2003

Ever look at your site's "similar pages" at Google? You type in related:, your page's url (minus the http://), and then Google presents you with a bewildering list. I looked at mine for the first time today, oddly enough at Israeli Google. (Don't ask.) The listed sites, that were in some mysterious way "related" to Volume 22, were an odd mix of pages that I link to and link to me, pages I link to that don't link to me, and pages I don't link to and don't link to me. I can understand listing sites that link to me and I link to them, but what about the sites that I don't link to and who don't link to me? How are these sites similar to mine? And who makes the decision that that such-and-such site is similar to mine? What criteria is used? Is it somehow vaguely based on links? Vauguely based on content? Google doesn't list everyone I link to who links to me, and only a couple of sites I link to but don't link to me. Confused? Welcome to my day-to-day life.

Jeez, I just reread the above paragraph and sections of the middle look like they were written by Gertrude Stein. In my head the above paragraph actually made sense.

Israeli Google reminds me of El Goog because it reads from right to left.

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