After reading this Crooked Timber entry, I went and typed ‘fistful’ and ‘euros’ in Google, and, get this, we’re the number one result for both. Ahead of companies with domains like euros.net, euros.nl, etc, presumably spending good money on their websites and marketing. Euros is a sponsored links query.
How about that?
4 Responses
Feed: A Fistful of Euros
October 28th, 2003 at 6:24 am
Interesting point David. Actually Google searches are a thing-in-themselves. If you go to the stats and track-back to see what the searches have been about they’re normally hilarious. Most of the people who show up and are really interested come through following links.
Incidentally, I had a strange experience on Saturday when a young Chinese blogger came across the messenger. She explained that using Google you can get to see Western blogs. You put a search and follow the Google-threaded link. As they say in China: cool. She was able to get Fistful while we were chatting.
Bottome line. If you want hits from Google, maybe accepting the official plural would have been a better strategy, I guess a lot more people enter ‘euro’ than ‘euros’ (although surprisingly not so many as you might think: I get a lot more for deflation than for euro). And those who enter ‘fistful’, well I wouldn’t even want to begin to try and imagine what they might be looking for!
October 28th, 2003 at 7:37 am
As the Chinese say: weiku.
(http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/05/30/china_web/)
October 28th, 2003 at 1:44 pm
Just did a run on today’s searches. Surprisinglys (for me at least) there are quite a few euros (no fistfuls) and the following outliers:
lampedusa msf
axelle guerin
maxima zorreguieta princess of holland
I think you can see where they come from. On Bonobo I gets lots looking for my animal friends, but I do get some really weird ones like people looking for spare parts for washing machines.
While I’m here, why don’t I ‘out’ Google on something else. I run two China pages, one on Sinosplice for inside China. Now when I went over to sinosplice Fons Tuinstra did warn me that Google might not be so friendly if I left blogger. So I kept the two pages running simultaneously. The sinosplice one has virtually all the inbound links.
Guess what: I still get virtually three times the hits on the (virtually linkless) blogger page as I do on the other.
So much for ‘network theory’. Naughty Google.
October 28th, 2003 at 7:10 pm
“Guess what: I still get virtually three times the hits on the (virtually linkless) blogger page as I do on the other.”
On the other, you’ve had lots of items on your Blogger pages linked to by high-powered bloggers like Brad DeLong. Not all links are created equal, at least, not according to the PageRank algorithm. A single link from a high-profile site is (correctly, IMHO) regarded as more valuable than several from much less popular pages.