Everything is Shit

I checked google today and did an ego search for “everything is shit” (without quotes) and sure enough, it was gone again. From page one to limbo in 24 hours. I checked as far back as page 30 and only found one link leading to this blog, nothing to the domain site itself. How can a service this fickle be relied upon for anything? Everything is shit .COM was right up front as the number one search result, as always, despite the fact that my site has been up longer, changes regularly, etc. (again, I wish them no ill will, I’m just perplexed.) Google is capricious at best — and is quickly becoming unusable (spent a half hour trying to find something on google yesterday, went to Yahoo and got it on the first try.)

All is not lost, however: the comment spammers who bizerked this blog after google put it on page one have not abandoned me, if anything they have redoubled their efforts to make sure I never feel unnoticed again. Kinda makes ya feel warm and fuzzy, eh?

Whadda Ya know? I wrote that post about google a week or so ago and now if you do a search for “everything is shit” — without quotes —  I’m on page one. Maybe they listened? With all the gazzilion voices out there could it be true? I don’t know, but its pretty cool anyway.

On the bad side, I cleared over a hundred spam comments out of my Akismet comment queue today. You people are costing me time. In fact, from this moment forward you are on notice: all spam comments (defined as comments that provide even a single link to any product being sold) will never see the light of day, will be deleted, and if I ever get lucky enough to find out who you are, be advised that I consider the time you are stealing from me to be valuable and I will charge you accordingly. The current rate that I am charging (subject to change at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with or without announcement, and may be backcharged to posts that were deleted BEFORE I changed the rate) is $10 per comment that you force me to delete. If you still choose to post spam comments, be advised that you are agreeing to the contractual relationship described above, and if I do find you, I will come to collect it with lawyers, guns and money (and you are agreeing to that too.) Have a nice day.

(Comments that are not spam [defined as comments that link to any non commercial site that is demonstrably relevant to the topic I am writing about] are not only excluded from the contractual relationship described above, but are welcome.)

Pollyanna loves Cassandra

How is it possible that you can get your own modest domain, pay for it, put it up, write some humble html — circa 1995 I will admit — and put up a modest blog that has no intention of ripping anyone off or making a dime, yet be shunned by the one search engine that counts? Seriously, type “everything is shit” in any search engine but google and you will find this site on the first page, right at the top, which makes sense: after all, “Everything is Shit” is the domain name for crying out loud. Try the same search — enclosed in quotes — on google and you will find it on page seven. Without quotes it sometimes shows up on page 27, sometimes on page 97, sometimes not at all. I mean nowhere.

What’s worse, you can find obscure blogs that use the word “shit” once, and you can find them repeated in the search results 10 to 15 times by the time you get to page 27! How can google claim to be a search engine when you can’t find a domain called “everything is shit” by typing the words “everything is shit”?

Worse still, there is a web site called “Everything is Shit.com” which is pretty cool, but it’s static: whoever put it up has written a short missive claiming that everything is shit and always has been. I enjoyed what the author had to say the one time I read it, and I even linked to his site. Nothing bad about it. Its just that its not the most profound thing I’ve ever read, and there is not much to it, and what little there is never changes, yet whenever I do a search for “everything is shit”, there it is at the top of page one. Is it possible half the world thinks this small group of paragraphs is so profound that everyone is linking to it? Is it possible that the author thinks that these few paragraphs are so important he spends weeks learning all the ever changing tricks to getting placed highly on google searches? I don’t see any money being made from his site so what is going on?

So far I’ve just been bitching (and let’s be honest, this blog/website is pretty much like that tree that fell in the forest: maybe it fell and maybe it even made a sound but who cares? I long ago stopped writing this for anyone but myself, and truth be told I’m pretty sure writing this blog in plain site has been the most private thing I’ve ever done — I doubt my own family would read it [even to be polite]); however, I think there might be something more than just bitching about my ratings here, and I think it reflects on the quality of google’s product.

This experience caused me to wonder if google is really all its cracked up to be. We have all gone through the horror of typing search terms into google, only to confront 3 million plus hits, much of it unrelated to anything we were searching for (I’ve often found it easier to search in google images than to do a google web search.) Curious, I started using Yahoo and found the search to be quicker, while the the results were more relevant. I had a similar experience with Dogpile — even LiveSearch was less frustrating. The only search engine that did not turn up results that were as good as google was Ixquick, which I still use sometimes because they respect our privacy and somebody needs to support them until they can match the other search engines (and when they do, they will be my only search engine.)

So, there it is. Google used to be a wonder. Now they have gotten so clever at defeating the search engine optimization experts that they outsmarted themselves and created a product that can’t find what you are looking for. Google, you have become shit.