h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Googlebot definately does use the terms that people use to link to pages. There was report of a trick that was being used a while ago to get people high up in the google entry, by loads of people with 'blogs' using the same text to link... It's called the googlebomb, it works like this...

If hundreds of people on h2g2 put this link into their homepage (and I'm not suggesting you do):

The coolest frood there is

...Google assumes that the website is really relevant to the link text and so searching for "coolest frood" would bring up the site...


This is the reason that "more evil than satan himself" used to bring up the Microsoft website on Google! (now it brings up news articles about the googlebomb)

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1868000/1868395.stm

mark, thanks for the tip earlier, i might do that when i get sorted out.

FATB

mufflewhump in google - 356 results

mufflewhump in bbc - 252 results

The search term 'ant' puts me at the top . I'm more famous than Ant and Dec or Alien Ant Farm . But then I sing better than them too.

'Ants' puts my anthology (geddit?) second but I'm only beaten by Walking with Beasts so that's OK. At least I'm higher up than the Tweenies.

Jim,
Since the system defaults to Alibaster if you don't log in or specify a skin, how hard would it be to set the defaults for an "Unknown Hitchhiker" to have no skin specified in the URL? That would make all search engine results non-skin-specific, without changing how the casual surfer saw the site...?

Our preferred solution would be for the system to detect whether it's being spidered by Googlebot, and if so to use a skin that doesn't include the skin name in any URLs. In this way the URLs in the search would always go to the right skin, while the actual pages searched would be in the default skin (ie Alabaster at this stage).

This will enable us to support any new skins without confusing the search, it will stop people from being switched to skins they don't use, and it will prevent pages from appearing twice.

Mufflewhump is on that much? I wish Pod were around to tell... It *is* his word, after all--I just give 'em out...

hello.

"Since the system defaults to Alibaster if you don't log in or specify a skin, how hard would it be to set the defaults for an "Unknown Hitchhiker" to have no skin specified in the URL? That would make all search engine results non-skin-specific, without changing how the casual surfer saw the site...?"

Not impossible. The actual reason the skin links were put in at all was to ensure that (when it finally happens) /dna/h2g2/text/ works for unregistered users. The reason we put the links in by default is to avoid (where possible) having to look up what the preferred skin of a user is.

However, when a user is unregistered, we don't try and guess, so dropping the default skin in the link *would* be an option.

I'll have to investigate all the ramifications, but as a simple change, it's a good idea.

*retracts the 'preferred solution' above in favour of Peet's original suggestion, which Jim's about to implement *

Having done a quick test, and checked that the code is indeed doing what I expect it should do, I think we'll be making this change, and hopefully, google will eventually update all its links.

and that plain text skin would be nice
or an XML skin ?

An XML skin already exists internally - but we always transform to HTML for users. It's trivial for us to serve any page on site as XML (like Amazon and Google have started doing) but we want to get GuideML settled before we do that.

true, difficult to write some xslt with no schema but I'd like to try .

Too...much...tech...talk...
Just please don't let the Italics all turn into the BOFH!

Hear hear!

I'm still coming to terms with the fact that the first thing our esteemed editor tried putting in the search engine was 'sex'. I wonder what results he got for 'bum' and 'willy'?

"Twinkle" on its own gets too many irrelevant hits, but "Twinkle h2g2" gets 796. I guess I'm popular after all.

That wasn't the first thing, Parferris. I can't tell you what *that* was...