by Nathan Stout
I will take this opportunity to update everyone on the 2010 Ranking Up Project (brought to you by Mennen Aftershave, not really).
I have done some searches on my own since the changes I made last week which you can read about here. Not only did I do searches of our names (Nathan Stout and Chris McGinty) I also did some searches for According To Whim and found some very surprising results.
Let’s start with my searches on Google. I searched Chris McGinty and nothing new appears to be there. I also searched for my name. The usual came up. The old website I used to own NathanStout.com but the fourth link down is my personal website: DragonOfTheBlackPool.com(in case you didn’t know, that is the name of the Chinese Restaurant in Big Trouble In Little China). These links are nothing new though. Several of my other pages come up too (none of them are the ones I recently played with).
Next I went and searched Chris McGinty on the pictures search on Google. I stopped looking after 14 pages of Chris Brown and other seemingly random images. Still no Chris McGinty. I then did a search for my name and as usual the image of the tiger from my personal website is up there 2nd to the top and some of the navigation images are sprinkled throughout. Nothing of the ‘super tagged’ images from last week.
Finally with Google I went to the video search. We (as a group) are doing very well there. We dominate all but 3 of the first page of items on that search (when searching Chris’ name). That guitar Chris McGinty guy is still at the top. I think it’s one of Chris’ life goals to kick that guy off that spot. When I search my name we have all but the top spot on the page. It’s some baby laughing (whose name is Nathan Stout). I will make it my life goal to kick that kid off there! Take that… cute… laughing… baby!
Now I moved onto Yahoo!’s website. Man that is confusing. How do you properly spell their name with there is an exclamation mark in it? Anyway after searching my name I get the usual 3 links on the first page. When I search Chris’ I get one link near the bottom for his name on the According To Whim site on one of the picture pages. It’s not even the tagged page, it’s the original picture shoot we did in 2005.
Searching images on Yahoo! for Chris I find that he finally shows up on page 11 (after a picture of me even). The pictures there are from that 2005 shoot too. Now, Yahoo! owns Flikr and that is one of the changes I made (after my last post). I uploaded all the pictures from the ‘tagged’ page (the 2009 photo shoot) to flikr (which is owned by Yahoo!). I thought since Yahoo! image searches focus on flikr then our chances would be better at ranking higher there. Nope, not yet at least. When I do a search for my name I find on page 4 all the images from my comics page: RickRanger.com all the way until page 9 when regular images show up again. On this page I have several photos from my person site (still none with me in them).
Finally I search for Chris on Yahoo!’s video page. There is only one page of results and Chris is there… not from According To Whim but an old Sniffles (sniff!) video from a Tripod.com page that doesn’t exist anymore. Here is a screenshot of the page: 
When I search my name on the Yahoo! video search I get nothing at all of me. Yahoo! needs to do some re-evaluation. One thing I found funny on Yahoo! is the predictive search box. This feature is becoming more and more common on the Internet and I think it is a cool feature. Basically when you are typing in the search box it will start showing you similarly searched phrases. It’s what otter people have typed into the search box in the past (the most popular combination of words). Well, when you start typing Chris McGinty one of the things (in fact the most popular since it is at the top of the box) is Chris McGinty Jewel. This is (one of) Chris’ ex wives. Interesting.
I am thinking we really need to get ourselves and our stuff on different websites. The whole cross-promotion thing generates more entries on search engines.