Sunday, April 01, 2007

My new wiki and Google

It's been almost two months since I set up my new website:

www.biographicalwiki.com

It's a place where anyone can publish a short biography about their deceased relatives for free. I even put a Google Ad on the pages of Biographical Wiki to see if we could make the site self sustaining. The jury's still out on that.

The odd thing that we've be looking for is when the biographies will show up in google search results. So far, the very first biography I posted does come up when your enter the name in quotes on a google search: "Martha Ann Truman". But the Biographical Wiki result has dropped to the last page recently.

As we've checked over the last week or so, other searches that used to bring up results on Google, no longer do. For example, "Clifford Leroy Howse" brought up google results a week ago, but no longer. The same with "Delbert Woolever".

On the other hand, "Charles Robert McCandless" has never had his biography show up on a google search results page.

Weird.

I think that Google does a six week cycle for crawling the web, but that is just hearsay.

We haven't been documenting our Google search results, so we can't really point to specifics at this time. But that is about to change. I like to have a little understanding about my world, even if it's only a vague impression of understanding. Getting Google search results for a few days and then no longer replicating those results only suggests that Google has changed something in the way they are building their indexes. I guess.

Someday I'll have a better, more informed idea how my new website is indexed by Google.

But for now I'm mystified.