Thursday, January 3, 2008

Amusing Findings in Keywords

Quick update (1/5/2008) - I feel much better now - 3 people have searched and found me through the highly relevant search - incredibly cool elearning guy ... thanks for helping out my mental state. Maybe I would have been in a better mood when I made my Ten Predictions for 2008.

Interestingly, Google has managed to find this particular post as the one that is most relevant to that term. So the comment that I may be messing with search results and making myself even more lame seems to be turning out correct. While I had dismissed it, I'm now no longer #1 for the search - top ten lamest people - even though I was yesterday before Google spidered this page. I'm still considered the worst learner, an innovation laggard, etc. But at least I'm not top ten lamest people!
People search in order to find information. The job of a search engine is to put the most relevant results at the top. When you plug in search terms, the engine tells us what it considers to be the most relevant results.

So, if you rank high in Google's results for a particular term (that people search on), you can see what the engine thinks are relevant terms for you.

For me, the good news is that I rank #1 for terms such as:
  • tony karrer
  • elearning technology
  • best elearning blog
The last one made me happy. Of course, there's the downside ... Below are some of the search terms that people used to find my blog and where Google considers me to be the #1 result ...
  • worst learner
  • laggard in technology innovation
  • bad day elearning
  • corporate training sucks
  • worst presentation award
  • bad things about e-learning
  • worst learning experience
  • beer elearning
  • bad rfp requirements
  • wasting time on technology
And my personal favorite where I rank #1 is:
  • top ten lamest people
Don't believe that Google thinks I'm the "top ten lamest people" or "worst learner" ... Try it yourself.

Should this worry me?

Luckily, I'm also #1 in "incredibly cool elearning guy" ...

(Of course, no one was kind enough to search on that term and then click on my blog).

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