Tuesday, September 27, 2005

27 September 2005: DuncMcRae

What do washing machine sales, backpacking holidays in New Zealand and a list of non-denominational churches in Iowa have in common? Me, apparently.

Yesterday, while searching for some very old Pasoti pages to prove a point, I ended up Googling myself, or more specifically my online 'DuncMcRae' persona, and was surprised by what came up. Top of the list was a recent syndication of this blog to LiveJournal, followed by the to-be-expected hits of This AKTing Lark and good ol' DuncMcRae.com, which I've barely updated since going round the world in 2002/03. But then the weirdness begins.

A few are understandable. I'm DuncMcRae on Pasoti, so there are some Plymouth Argyle pages, and Judith Owen's website needed an email address (which they published!) so I gave them my spam-happy netscape.net account details. But then it gets very weird.

The legendary photograph of Gareth bravely eating grilled cow saliva gland in Buenos Aires is quoted by several posters on RealityTVPlanet.com, whatever that may be, in some kind of competition to discover disgusting things eaten in Argentina. Factbites.com have a section on Kelvin MacKenzie and seem to have treated the Spinners story as a factual report, which surprises me since the story details the ongoing power struggle for the British government between Bill Gates and the Teletubbies.

Most wonderful, though, is the (possibly soon-to-be-vanishing) 'Washing Machine' search page at shop-4.it. The website sadly no longer exists, but Google's cache of the page clearly reveals that my round-the-world diary site is the fourth best place to look for cheap washing machines online. Fourth? Yes, sadly my e-commerce washing machine enterprise is being beaten by Kelkoo UK and a couple of Scottish cottage-letting agencies.

Try the same trick on MSN or Yahoo and you don't get anything as interesting, although for some reason they both link my name with a call-girl page from Kaitaia (New Zealand), which I didn't click on to find out more! Given that the most fun I had in Kaitaia was watching Premiership football live at 4am on Sunday mornings, I'm not sure where they got that from. Maybe the Wayfarer Motel had a lot more going on than I knew about?

Either way, it just goes to show that Google remains ahead of the competition. Any search engine that can use me to link Argentinean cow saliva glands, Plymouth Argyle and online washing machine sales is worth its place as my default search engine.

Now, didn't I have some work to do?

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