Kevin Drum convinced me to do what only John Quiggin ever does and you know what? I have a new appreciation for whatever sort of behind-the-scenes filtering Google does. What did I learn when I "binged" my name?
The Good: The pieces Kotsko and I wrote for Inside Higher Ed are linked everywhere: Bookforum, conference presentations, librarian sites, departmental pages, course pages.
The Bad: You can't search for links through bing, so the best I can do is tell to you search for my name and go through the thirty pages that show up.
The Good: People link to and reprint a lot of what I write at Edge of the American West.
The Bad: Many of those "people" are spam-type content aggregators that neither link nor credit me as the author.
The Good: Acephalous appears on more course and faculty pages than I can shake a hundred sticks at.
The Bad: They invariably refer to me as a "graduate student blogger."
The Good: Many people linked to things I've written in an attempt to engage me in a dialogue.
The Bad: Google never told me they did this, so these people likely think I snubbed them. (I didn't! Had I but known I would've responded!)
The Good: It seems like bing catches content no matter who it's attributed to, such that searching for my name results in links to what I've written even when my name or a link to one of my blogs isn't included.
The Bad: One such site must have had my prose in its metadata, because the only thing visible on the page were pictures of a naked white woman surrounded by fifty naked black men.
The Good: The image search doesn't turn up any pictures of me.
The Horror: It returns seventeen images of a bearded guy who sorta kinda looks like me smoking a series of gigantic bongs and is identified as "Scott Eric Kaufman from California." Future potential employers take note: that's not me.
Awww... I "binged" your name and couldn't find this phantom bearded pot smoker :-(
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 02:41 PM
I don't want to link to it (for obvious reasons), but they're there on the second page and bing says they're linked from Facebook.
That said, from my perspective, if they're not showing up when you search for me, all the better.
Posted by: SEK | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 02:47 PM
Hm: if the non-people neither link to nor credit you, how do their sites show up on a results list for your identity?
Posted by: The Modesto Kid | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 05:32 PM
My Bing results are strikingly similar to my Google results, except they're in a less logical order.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Monday, 20 July 2009 at 08:12 PM
On not knowing people had linked to your site - on my old blog (which I deleted before going on the job market), I used to use trackbacks: whatever happened to that system in the couple of years I wasn't blogging? They don't seem to be available anymore (at least on blogger) to notify people that you've linked to their posts. Now I've started a new (researchy) journal, I get far fewer visitors than I used to with trackback pings. And it was a great way to start up cross-blog conversations.
Posted by: Katrina | Wednesday, 22 July 2009 at 02:07 PM
Wordpress has automatic trackback. Blogger just sucks -- why did Google buy up Blogger rather than Wordpress? Wordpress fits their aesthetic so much better.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 08:59 PM