:: Find What You're Looking For ::

...aka "how to manipulate Google to amusing effect."

Regular readers will be aware of my current obsession with random search terms - and which ones end up directing the hapless googler to this very site. The latest faintly droll combination to reach Devukha is short rude lyrics your mum. As many of you will be aware, Google uses an system called PageRank, which assesses a given site's importance, when prioritising search results. The simplest view of this would be to say that the more people that link to your site, the better your PageRank would be. In this way, small private blogs might be tricky to find if searched for using very common words. Of course, I circumvent this by using the very obscure Devukha as the blog's name. A rather less inventive name, say Bob's Blog, come up with large numbers of results (in this case about 17500!), making it hard to find out about your mate Bob's exploits down the pub, rather than the preoccupations of some pre=op transexual named Bob in Minnesota. The art of ensuring a high presence on Google searches has therefore become a very significant part of the prefessional webdesigner's job. At my company, for example, the Website Designer had to put in huge numbers of extra hours when Google recently changed the way in Which PageRank works - we no longer appeared at the top of some significant searches.

With this in mind, I was surprised to discover the results of typing the following into Google: miserable failure. The first result is as much a testament to the vagaries of Google's PageRank Algorithm as to those who have learnt to manipulate it.

We now move seamlessly from techno-babble to techno-bollox as a new site offers you the opportunity to send emails from beyond the grave. Whether this is a spoof or not has yet to be established...

And all this on the day when it was announced that Macca and Britney are to appear in the new (bound to be awful) Carry On London. Apparently her character is going to be called Rhoda Freely, sexy daughter of (you guessed it) IP Freely, played by Burt Reynolds. I still maintain that none of the Carry-Ons have been funny since Carry On the Khyber. Oh well, another one to miss - unlike tonight's bAsTaRd, which features at least one very special guest...