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ego-scanning report
Feb. 21st, 2003 01:55 pmThis afternoon I went looking for my two closest friends from my first year of college. (Found'em too -- one got her PhD in Brit Lit at Princeton and is now an Assistant Prof at UTenn, the other became a Perl geek and Usenet cabalist.) I found myself wondering, if any of them ever looked for me, would they find me?
You see, my forename is biblical and my surname is Irish. A Google search for "Matthew Ryan" gets 21,000 hits. I have a surprisingly common moniker. At last count I have 14 namesakes just in the Boston area.
Today I learned that the top two links on the Google search for "Matthew Ryan" are myself. Also the top three links on the search for "Matt Ryan". Wow!
I read up on Google's PageRank system to understand this. Pages are ordered in your search results by importance and relevance. Relevance has to do with how often and prominently your search terms appear, both on the page and on the pages that point to it. I don't imagine that's it -- there's plenty of "Matthew Ryan" homepages out there.
Importance is measured by link-popularity: a combination of 1) how many other pages out there point to this page and 2) the link-popularity of *those* pages. So a page get ranked highest if lots of pages point to pages that point to it.
I did a search for pages that point to world.std.com/~mbr2 (available under "Advanced Search"), and found that over half of the mere 50 or so are other pages of mine: mostly scanned articles about Client-Centered Therapy that I put up in 1995 when there was nothing out there. However none of those pages are particularly link-popular! So it appears that it's solely my little cluster of back-referencing pages from eight years ago puts me at the top of the Matthew Ryan heap.
It's a good thing putting up those pages constituted a significant service to my discipline, or else I'd be a bit embarrassed about that. :-)
You see, my forename is biblical and my surname is Irish. A Google search for "Matthew Ryan" gets 21,000 hits. I have a surprisingly common moniker. At last count I have 14 namesakes just in the Boston area.
Today I learned that the top two links on the Google search for "Matthew Ryan" are myself. Also the top three links on the search for "Matt Ryan". Wow!
I read up on Google's PageRank system to understand this. Pages are ordered in your search results by importance and relevance. Relevance has to do with how often and prominently your search terms appear, both on the page and on the pages that point to it. I don't imagine that's it -- there's plenty of "Matthew Ryan" homepages out there.
Importance is measured by link-popularity: a combination of 1) how many other pages out there point to this page and 2) the link-popularity of *those* pages. So a page get ranked highest if lots of pages point to pages that point to it.
I did a search for pages that point to world.std.com/~mbr2 (available under "Advanced Search"), and found that over half of the mere 50 or so are other pages of mine: mostly scanned articles about Client-Centered Therapy that I put up in 1995 when there was nothing out there. However none of those pages are particularly link-popular! So it appears that it's solely my little cluster of back-referencing pages from eight years ago puts me at the top of the Matthew Ryan heap.
It's a good thing putting up those pages constituted a significant service to my discipline, or else I'd be a bit embarrassed about that. :-)
