* * * * *
                                        
                           A Google Bombing variant?
                                        
Spring [1] has been looking for a program that will scan the webserver log
files for pages served up by search engines—obstensibly for Disturbing Search
Requests. [2] She hasn't found any, so today I quickly wrote one up for her. 

The odd thing I noticed though, as I watched her use the program on her site
[3] and my site [4] and my blog [5] is that my blog has way more search
requests than hers does. 

In fact, going over the three largest sites on this server (www.springdew.com
[6], www.conman.org [7] and boston.conman.org [8]) that my blog/online
journal here averages about twice the search requests as the other sites. I
think that has something to do with the way this site works. Google (just to
pick a search engine) will have indexed the same entry about five times—once
on main page [9], once for day [10], once for the month [11], once for the
year (don't want to bog down the server needlessly for that example) and once
for itself [12]. 

I'm not sure how much that affects the final ranking of a particular page
since they're all intrasite links but it does have to skew the results
somehow. Somehow it feels like I'm Google [13] Bombing [14] my own site with
my own site. 

[1] http://www.springdew.com/
[2] http://searchrequests.weblogs.com/
[3] http://www.springdew.com/
[4] http://www.conman.org/
[5] https://boston.conman.org/
[6] http://www.springdew.com/
[7] http://www.conman.org/
[8] https://boston.conman.org/
[9] https://boston.conman.org/
[10] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2002/03/28
[11] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2002/03
[12] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/03/28.1
[13] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Googlebombing
[14] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Google+bombing&spell=1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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