For my regular readers, you know that I spend a lot of time commenting on all of the ridiculous terms that people suddenly start searching for in Google. If you don’t know that yet, then I don’t know why I went through all the trouble coming up with the catchy tagline for this blog: “Tracking the bizarre things people suddenly search for at Google.” It says it right at the top of this page for crying out loud. New readers: pay attention…we work quickly here.

Regular readers (all 5 of you) will also know that I often complain that this blog doesn’t get any notoriety despite the brilliant commentary and side-splitting humor opposite some other really crappy blogs. In fact, I just wrote about this the other day. However, miraculously, the wait is over.

I got to work today and after knocking out some emails checked the latest Google Hot Trends looking for some fodder and was frankly amazed to find out that this blog was in Google Hot Trends. There it was, plain as day…”Everyone But You”…listing number 4. Of course, when you search for this in Google, we’re right up at the top and the number one listing if you search in blogs only.

Believe me, no one is more surprised by this than I am. I’ve done a lot to try to optimize the site for search and have submitted it to every contest imaginable, added Feedburner, begged for links from friends, posted comments with my URL, tried SEM, added every button and chicklet available, and generally prayed to the Internet gods for a simple mention on the right page. That day arrived today…you’ll probably miss my moaning about never getting any recognition.

Ironically, it took me a while to figure out what happened and how we got such an immediate search boost (for the record, as of right now, 9:15 AM, we’ve had over 41,000 visitors today so far versus our 50-100 average. My hosting company called me this morning to see if I would authorize additional bandwith to handle all the new traffic, which I happily did). To be honest, I didn’t discover the reason on my own, someone sent me an email from the form on the site to congratulate me and to say how lucky I was that Sergey mentioned that this site is “a great example of people really having fun with our products, but also showing tremendous loyalty to the Google brand.” Who the hell is Sergey?

After a little more digging (as I confess that apparently I don’t know that much about Google after all), I discovered that the Sergey in question was indeed none other than Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. Apparently, at a recent conference, he spoke about what Google Labs products would move into full releases this year. You can check out the press release from the conference right here. For those too lazy to read the entire thing, here’s the important quote from Sergey: “As we head into April, we’ve got a lot of work to do in order to reach our goal of having two Labs projects promoted to full releases by the end of the summer. Google Trends is a likely candidate, as it’s been very popular, is on a very high percentage of iGoogle pages, and has had most technical issues addressed. You also see a lot of grassroots support of this product with a bunch of sites and blogs dedicated only to Google Trends. Someone sent me a link to a pretty amusing one recently called Everyone But You. It’s a great example of people really having fun with our products, but also showing tremendous loyalty to the Google brand.”

41,000 unique visitors so far today and it’s only just begun. You can always say you knew me when…

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Posted on April 1st, 2008 by Jonathan - Everyone But You
Filed under: A Little Bit of Everything, everyone but you, google

Can't get enough? Here are some more totally random posts:
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• Pontoon: a Boat, a Card Game, a Hot Search? - May 1- 3:45 PM