dispatches from the new world of work

Whence These Google Numbers?

Tom posted his most recent Google-juice numbers in the "Bio & PR" section of the website late last week. As good Brand Yous, we assume you're all googling yourselves on a fairly regular basis. (The first thing anyone does after meeting you is to go home and google your name, so you better know what they're seeing.) I took a look at Tom's document (which you can find on this page in the right-hand column) and then googled "Tom Peters" (using the quotes in the search) and came up with a number that was quite a bit lower than the one he had documented. And so asked him about that. Nothing devious or untoward as it turns out. Seems that the Google search results fluctuate wildly. As Tom notes, he's been as high as 3.9 million and as low as 1.8 million in the same week. (And, no, he's not checking his numbers every day!)

Do the same search at Microsoft's Windows Live and Ask.com, and while the numbers of results are significantly lower, they remain more or less constant day to day and week to week. Go figure.

Erik Hansen posted this on 11/16/06.

Comments

I would argue whatâ€™s more impressive is not that â€œTom Petersâ€ return 2.8 million hits but â€œTom Peters filetype:pdfâ€ returns 1.1 million hits. People and organizations that are willing to convert their content to PDF format tells you something about the quality of the work itself.

Posted by RTodd at November 16, 2006 4:07 PM

Hey Erik

When I googled "Erik-Hansen-comedy", I got 740,000 matches.
That means you are statistically funny.

Good work my friend!

Tim

Posted by Tim Sanders at November 16, 2006 4:26 PM

tim,

statistically, virtually, visually, physically, it's good to be funny.
and good to hear from you. in two ways. (your newsletter just dropped into my box.) and i am washing my hands like crazy these days.

erik

Posted by Erik Hansen at November 16, 2006 4:40 PM

A good reminder Erik. Two learnings - didn't know my smugmug photo collection would show up, and two, I really need to find a designer for my website....hope things are cool dude...mtn

Posted by Mike Neiss at November 16, 2006 4:58 PM

Depends which DC in Google that you get connected to when Search Enginge Results Pages (SERP) are returned.

Secondly, the link farms are dynamic and not all DC's have been refreshed based on the Crawl and Spidering process. That is the way of the web and the number between ask.com and Live.com are more or less constant, is because they still have not fully matured their index farms !! :)-

solly, I only live by Google .. :)-

Posted by /pd at November 16, 2006 6:40 PM

pd, we disagree. My answer to most everything under the sun is ... Triangulate! I love to come at stuff from a hundred directions, then let my conclusions somehow triangulate themselves into my mind. I abhor the word "best"--and the idea of "One best way." (Maybe that's one reason I loved James Surowiecki's (sp?) The Wisdom of Crowds.)

Posted by tom peters at November 16, 2006 11:08 PM

I googled my name - apparently I am a well known bay area Jazz Bassoonist - well if this management stuff doesn't work out I have always got my music career to fall back on!

Posted by PaulH at November 17, 2006 2:57 AM

tom, yes I hear what you are saying, Its unfortante that the results from live.com and ask.com are not as granular as the results of Google.

I second the that there is no --"One best way.", but is only (so far) that google has been able to create a pardigm that has debunked the web away so fast and too so many.

...and you know that I an't kidden you :)-

Posted by /pd at November 17, 2006 7:58 PM

tom, I hear on this, there is no "one best way" and art of "Triangulate" is varied !!

Ask.com and Live. com are still babies compared to what Google can do and is doing. They have debunked the web and our lifes to a greater extent.

..and you know that I' ant kiddin you - correct ?? :)-

Posted by /pd at November 17, 2006 8:02 PM

Lucky you Paul - imagine what I get when I Google my name!!! :-)

Posted by Trevor Gay at November 19, 2006 6:25 PM