Skimper

Why is this Blathering called "skimper"? Skimper really isn't a word, as far as I know, though I suppose some people think of "skimper" as an action that is halfway between a jump and a skip. My niece came up with the term on her own as well. Googling for the term turns up 21,400 results even though the word isn't in the dictionary. More on why I'm talking about skimper later in this Blathering.

Had fun with Jodi last night. We both enjoyed Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. If you're a fan of the other W&G films, you won't be disappointed by this one.

So I did some Googling for mention of Magic Tails today out of curiosity and happily found mentions on the Penguin Group (USA) page and The Best Reviews as well as other sites. I was somewhat surprised to find my own Blathering entry on the topic in the first page of results since I only wrote about the short story recently.

I've been told by several people that my Blatherings have a lot "Google juice," that pages from my online journal tend to come up early in search results. I've always been intrigued by search engine rankings.

As an experiment, I Googled for some terms or words that I've written about in the past few months. When listing the ranking number, I only include primary results, not the sub-results (indented). Here are the results as of Friday, Nov. 4th, when you enter the following terms in quotes:

"wo ist der bahnhof": I get the #1 ranking out of 942

"filk FAQ": #3 ranking out of 15,000 (comes out as #1 if you enter the term without quotes)

"filking": #1 ranking out of 41,700

"Vulcan, AB": #4 ranking out of 12,800

"Filkcontinental": #3 ranking (my Flickr photoset) out of 11,800, #4 (Blathering report)

"useful foreign phrases": #2 ranking out of 517

"Killarney canoe trip": #1 ranking out of 528

"german CDs": #3 ranking out of 16,100

What's interesting is that I didn't really put any special effort into getting the above pages ranked highly on search engines. And I can't really see enough people linking to my Blathering on "useful foreign phrases" to affect Google rankings. So what gives?

And this brings me back to the word "skimper." I'm going to see if I can make this page the #1 result for the term in Google, out of 21,400 results. I've called this entry "Skimper" as well as using the term in the page text, given "skimper" as alt text for the image at the top.

Now let's see what happens.

By the way, I'm replacing the Blatherings search engine in the sidebar to the Google site search box below. Feel free to try it out!

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