Comments on: Google yourself and see … your past item sharing!! (???)

By: Sir Pent

Sir Pent — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:27:03 +0000

I think mine would be PORN PORN PORN…so I will refrain from that search.

Sir Pent
drummer of the Lizards From Afar
ALL music by the Lizards From Afar available FREE at:
http://reverbnation.com/lizardsfromafar

By: Nikos Anagnostou

Nikos Anagnostou — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:54:29 +0000

@atul Yes, I do use Friendfeed but had not seen Erhan’s mentioning. Thanks for passing the info.

By: atul

atul — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:49:21 +0000

Nikos – are you using FriendFeed. Erhan also mentioned the same issue in http://friendfeed.com/e/8546c536-d02a-46f7-bdf1-efc9c9f5281a/Of-course-Google-is-following-my-sharings-in-FF/. I am seeing the same problem too when I try a vanity search for my name.

By: Nikos Anagnostou

Nikos Anagnostou — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:36:39 +0000

@vrypan Thanks for the explanation but I think it falls short in one thing: the shared items are not direct links to other sites. They are links to feeds. Which means that, if the basis of your explanation is correct, Google makes a lot of processing before publishing the results: relates feeds to pages, translates my shared items as links to pages and then aggregates the whole thing. Which leads me to think that there might be even more entity relationship processing behind the scenes, that relate me to my slice of the web, so to speak. Maybe a new algorithm is at play that takes into consideration a lot of social aspects too.

By: vrypan

vrypan — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 10:19:36 +0000

Here is my explanation. Google depends much on the links going to a page, to deduce what this page is about. This is how googlebombing was done, it’s not like the target page includes the word “failure” (to use a famous googlebomb example , but that other pages link the word failure to a specific page (G.W.Bush).

So, if you shared items appear on a public page, an the link includes the words “by Nikos Anagnostou”, Google understands that the target page is somehow related to “Nikos Anagnostou”. Depending on how you look at it those may be relevant or irrelevant results.