SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines are strange beasts. You can enter the same search term day after day and get radically different results each time. A relatively recently-posted document gets treated in a particularly erratic way. One day the search engine will "find" it and the next day not. Where Google is concerned, it seems to take at least a month until a new document is regularly "found". I have been keeping a eye on the three critiques I recently wrote which demolish three bodies of Leftist writing about the psychology of conservatism. I would hope that anybody taking an interest in any of the "research" concerned would be certain to see my critique of it. I got particularly good results last night. On a Yahoo search using the terms social dominance orientation and Alain Van Hiel, my critique was the second document the search returned in both cases. I hope the ranking eventually settles down like that. Google also found my article on need for closure for the first time yesterday but it came in as about the 70th document on that search. It should move up as they find more links to it, however. This article explains some of the mystery behind Google’s erratic results in the first month.

It is hard to believe but some foolish French firm has just sued Google over the way Google uses its name in search results. If I were running Google I would just bar ANY results for the name of that firm. That would cause a quick change of tune.

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