“It’s not going to come up with anything.” That’s what I thought when Lora challenged me to Google her first name. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Lora’s site, WhatIsNew, is listed as the third item. In disbelief, I had to try my name, Loren. Hmm. This blog is listed 6th. Quite amazing when you think of all the references to Loren out there.
This got me thinking. What about our brother Layne that runs TabletQuestions. A quick Google search and yep, there he is #17. Searching for “Layne” returns over one million links and he’s number 17. Simply amazing.
We started to feel good at this point. So over to http://beta.search.msn.com and wouldn’t you know it, but MSN gives the three of us even higher rankings:
For “Lora”, WhatIsNew is #1
For “Layne”, TabletQuestions is #3
For “Loren”, This blog is #8
Now we definitely have some rather unique names, but that doesn’t explain all of this. I’m guessing it’s because of the Tablet PC. Through links here and there and people mentioning our names when they refer to our sites, we’ve built up a respectable link ranking.
One sidenote: Notice how Layne’s ranking is demonstrably different between Google and MSN’s beta search. I wonder if source text around a link is contributing to the difference. He rarely mentions his full name on TabletQuestions (he uses LPH instead) so I can see how Google missed this. The MSN Search didn’t though. Interesting.
