View source for RainDog's Second Rant

Some visitors finally started showing up to browse this site, as I tell in my [[User:RainDog/Blog2007-10|Blog for October]]. Nobody actually logged on or anything, but a couple of pages started showing up on Google. To see them, you have to Google something kinky, but they're there. For how long?

Because the bad news is that the home page of my [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia] site, which had finally been crawled and listed by Googlebot (far down of course), has already entirely disappeared from Google.

I put an enormous amount of work into installing and configuring that site, and then into writing encyclopedia articles on the subject of [[Convivial Tools]]. After months of effort, only the first page of the site had been Googled. There was nothing on that frigging first page, it was just an entry point. Nobody read any of my articles, because nobody other than a few close friends and relatives knew any of them were there. (Even the friends and relatives were lukewarm about it, but what do they know?) Nobody else ever looked at that miserable first page - and now even it is gone. 

There's an explanation (there's always an explanation). The crawler looks to see if any changes have been made since it came the last time. If there aren't, it classes the site as inactive. But then why do some inactive sites hang on forever?

I'm starting to understand this whole Google business. It's a bigger monopoly than Microsoft! Some one will tell me that Apple maintains competition in the one case, and Yahoo in the other. But Microsoft's stranglehold concerns a particular techology (PC operating systems), whereas Google has a monopoly over the handling of '''global information'''. It's become more powerful than traditional media like newspapers or television, because there are many of them, but only one [[Google Mafia]].

What can we do to take back the control of our communication channels, to escape from the frenetic chase after Search Engine Optimisation? I can feel myself getting sucked in: my Google rating is becoming more important than what I have to say. We have to develop the free software equivalent of a search engine.

[[Category:RainDog's Opinions]]