02 November 2011

Google Vanity

  I quite often find myself opening a browser window with no intention of actually looking at anything. During one of these moments, staring at the Google.co.uk page with no plans to actually do anything, I was struck with an idea. How many pages into the results will I find the first entry that refers to me?

  I started by searching for this blog, using the words Testing and Chef, without any quotes. 29 pages later and frankly wondering what the hell I was doing continuing with this charade, I found the first reference to this blog.

  Then I tried adding quotes around the words. This was better, with me having a result at the bottom of the first page.

  My final attempt to find the blog was to use testingchef as a single word. This returned the most results, including my twitter profile, but I had to make Google search for what I asked, it deciding that I must have meant to search on Testing and Chef again.

  Lastly, I thought I'd see where my first entry is when using my name. As you can guess, with a name like Andrew Morton there were a lot of results tedious books of royals and other 'celebrities'. I found my first mention on page 8, which happened to be my Software Testing Club profile.

  My plan (assuming I remember) is to repeat this next year and see if the results have dramatically changed.

...

  I'm so sad.

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