Recently in Internet Category

I looked at Play.com today. Here's a screenshot.

Seems pretty innocuous, right?

Then I noticed this:

Yeah Mr. Ross. At the moment, I bet you are wondering why you say these things.

I've been using the internet for a long time. Quite a long time. About 11 years in fact, which is at present half of my life. Quite obviously I did not have a website the instant that I got online - no, that occured a few years later. It was in approximately 2000 or 2001 when I got my first online journal and It all spawned from that. From using another blog hosting site to having my own domain. And what a wonderful world it is.

Way back when, in oh let me think, about 2003/2004 when I got this domain name, it would take up to approximately six weeks to get indexed by Google, and the other major search engines. Back then, people would put words into META tagas and hope that the eponymous Google would pick them up and rank them well.

Now, things seem to have changed. Those six weeks? Nah, nothing of the sort, and this was proved to me yesterday afternoon. Shortly after I wrote yesterday's entry, and by shortly I mean an hour or two, I decided to search on Google for the term "Weber and Foucault's Theories of Power". What appeared on my screen? Nothing other than my entry. Upon writing this entry, a link from Google is available in third place for that particular search term. If you change the search term to "Weber and Foucault on Power", this website appears at the bottom of the first page. However, on another three search engines (Ask (bring back Jeeves!), Altavista and Yahoo!), this page did not appear.

Buh...that was so quick. It became plainly obvious to me that Google have changed the way that they search things. No longer does it have to become indexed, but rather they crawl all of their pages in literally nanoseconds. Mind boggling.

If you are reading this in 2020, I am sure that all you now have to do is think about something and immediately a Google search results page appears before your eyes. However, back here in 2008 it is all a little bit new. All a bit...stalkerish? Perhaps to some. It's fine by me. I like how immediate information has become in the "digital age" to use one of those horrible clichés. Keep Googling me kids!

Perhaps one day my musings will be of use to someone hurriedly doing their dissertation. Or, more likely, merely wasting their time.

And for anyone who is interested, I should find out the results of my essay on Weber and Foucault theories of power in approximately two weeks time.