Tuesday, December 04, 2012

The strange behavior of Google search

The statistics for this blog include search words used to find an entry.  Every so often I follow up on these search words to see where Google had ranked my entries.

"why read is irregular"  had nearly 19 million hits and "Why read?" is at the top!

"toast anachronism" had about of 3.5 million hits and "French toast – an anachronism in a classic of French literature" is also at the top!

Has Google changed its algorithms to be give more personal results?  That is, do these show at the top because my name is in them?  Or did I really have blog entries that were more appropriate to the query?  I could believe this with a find of a couple of dozen, but not millions.