{"id":216,"date":"2009-02-08T23:35:26","date_gmt":"2009-02-08T23:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/02\/08\/on_leveraging_google_for_my_own_inimical_ends\/"},"modified":"2009-02-08T23:35:26","modified_gmt":"2009-02-08T23:35:26","slug":"on_leveraging_google_for_my_own_inimical_ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/02\/08\/on_leveraging_google_for_my_own_inimical_ends\/","title":{"rendered":"On leveraging Google for my own inimical ends."},"content":{"rendered":"

About a year ago I came up with a cunning plan for a game for the two Pawns, and part of that plan was creating a secret web page and making a link to it from a different, google-indexed web page, so that when the Pawns googled<\/a> a certain Clue phrase they would have found the next Clue. That project disappeared beneath all my other half-finished projects, but I was reminded of it, and the art of google-spiking, a couple of days ago.<\/p>\n

\nLast week I reviewed<\/a> Jenny<\/a> ‘s book<\/a> and she asked me what I meant by the title of the review (“I’m a professional cynic but my heart’s not in it”). I said it was a line from a Blur song, but I couldn’t remember which one, so I googled<\/a> it [1]. I was gratified to find that the second hit was my blog entry at the Lab Rats. Jenny, however, reported that when she googled exactly the same phrase, it was the ninth<\/em> hit. Me being me I started trying different versions of Google (.com, .com.au, .co.uk …) to see if there was a pattern, but consistently got second place. Jenny suggested that Google knew I was in Australia and was therefore returning Antipodean-centered results, which is an interesting hypothesis: at the time I thought it might be fun to get some more people to try it, and see what we could find, but real life intervened.<\/p>\n

\nThis morning I tried<\/a> again, and found that the Lab Rats is sixth, but second place is taken by my Friendfeed<\/a> notification. How bizarre. The link to the review on Amazon.com is on the second page of the Google results.<\/p>\n

\nSo, in the best traditions of quantum mechanics — that is, in the observing of something we actually change it (and ourselves) — your task, my willing minions, is to google “I’m a professional cynic but my heart’s not in it” and report back what you find; and<\/em> click through to this blog entry once it’s there to make me number one.<\/p>\n

1<\/sup> Country House<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a year ago I came up with a cunning plan for a game for the two Pawns, and part of that plan was creating a secret web page and making a link to it from a different, google-indexed web … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}