Google remembers

At some ungodly hour this morning I sent an email round to a few people announcing this site to the world. There was no real reason to do this other than: a) to keep my fingers busy; b) to justify to myself the time I wasted invested in overhauling it.

One of the first responses back was from Alex Buckley who pointed out a series of embarassingly clumsy typos (duly noted and corrected, thanks Alex!). A more interesting element in his message, however, was the observation that my web page didn’t appear very high Google’s page rankings. In fact, it barely appeared at all with the search term Mustafa Arif.

Now, most of you will be aware that Google is probably the best search engine currently available (having stolen the crown from AltaVista several years ago. Google uses an alogorithm called PageRank to achieve its high accuracy. Basically, amongst other things, it ranks your web page according to the number of other web sites that hyperlink to it with the search term. So, the more people link to this site with a hyperlink like Mustafa Arif, the higher Google’s PageRank for it will be.

My site used to have a high page rank (and indeed used to come out as the first link) at its old URL when hosted by the Department of Computing at Imperial College. Unfortunately, when I moved over to my own domain name most people didn’t bother updating their links, partly because the site remained out of date, and partly because the old URL continued redirecting. Consequently, the old URL slowly dropped down the rankings (until the redirect died) and the new one never really made it up there.

In contrast, Alex’s page comes up as the first result when you Google for Alex Buckley which is mightily impressive. Alex has offered to re-instate the Links section of his now skeletal site to help push my ranking up, which is awfully nice of him. I guess I need to persuade more of my friends to do likewise.

Spurred on by Alex’s observation I decided to Google for myself (something I haven’t done for a while – and I soon remebered why). The trouble with the web is that many things just never get deleted and Google remembers where they are and digs them out for the world to mock you with. Yet another benefit then of getting your own site’s PageRank up (thus gaining a slightly higher probability of control over what surfers read about you).

Comments on online bulletin boards are often what I most regret when I search for myself on the web – especially those on Live!. From a mis-spent youth there are also things I’d rather forget in the Usenet archives. What I was somewhat more surprised to find, however, was the script for The Tragedy of RomEEE and JulISE, a pastiche of the Shakespearean play written as a joint ISE/EEE contribution to the 2003 EESoc Revue. Somehow I got talked into playing myself on that occasion…