it's me, only not me

Have you ever searched for yourself on google?

There are two ways of doing this--you can search for your actual name or you can search for your username. Some people use a lot of different usernames (I've never quite seen why myself) so the second one is only really interesting if you keep the same username, like me.

I first did this when I got my first PC way back when. It was something of an eye opener. There's someone called Mark Sunderland who is a photographer (in the states, I think) and you can buy prints from him.

When I first discovered this I considered buying some of his stuff--it's not all that bad. I decided against it in the end, but it would have been kinda cool.

The search I tend to do is on my standard username, trismugistus. My website trismugistus.com always used to be the top result, but when I checked recently it had actually slipped to the second page. This seemed a little bizarre to me and makes me wonder quite how google does its rankings.

I mean, there's plenty of stuff on trismugistus.com and of course when I post in forums, etc, my website is in my sig, so it should all be interrelated. However, it occurs to me that as I've added more sites to my 'family' I've had to shrink the link. That is, it often says "trigs.com" or similar nowadays, so maybe that affects how google sees it all?

Anyway, one of the great things about google of course is you can also do image searches and that really does bring up a bizarre set of results. One of the things that's most interesting about my search results is all the scans that have been stolen from me. People don't change the filenames and since they got them from AP, that's why it finds them.

AP used to have actual stats visible--number of page views, number of dls, that sort of thing, but a while back they removed them. Now there's just the "popularity" ranking available via the gallery.

They've always had that too, and some of my stuff was up in the first ten pages, but I was always left wondering if people actually like my stuff. The google image results thing tends to suggest they kinda did :).