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 some kinky combination, but they're there. For how long?

The bad news is that the home page of my [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia] site, which had finally been crawled by Googlebot and listed by Google (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. And '''nobody''' read any of my articles, because no one other than a few close friends and relatives could even know that any of them were there: they weren't indexed on Google. There was only that miserable first page - and now even it is gone. 

Apparently there is an explanation for this disappearance (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 will say that Apple maintains competition in the one case, and Yahoo in the other, but the market shares speak for themselves. And Microsoft's stranglehold concerns only a particular techology (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 [[GoogleMafia]].

What can we do to take back the control of our communication channels, to escape from the frenetic chase after [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimisation Search Engine Optimisation]? I can feel myself getting sucked in: my Google rating is becoming more important to me than what I have to say.

WE HAVE TO DEVELOP THE EQUIVALENT OF A FREE SOFTWARE ALTERNATIVE TO THE SEARCH ENGINE.

==See also==
*[[RainDog's Editorial|RainDog's First Rant]]
*[[GoogleMafia]]
*[[GING]]

[[Category:RainDog's Opinions]]