When I started university at Acadia in 1994, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. I started learning HTML in my second year and set up a rudimentary homepage for myself that year. At the time Yahoo and Google were not yet on the scene, and AltaVista was my search engine of choice. I remember how excited I was the day I discovered their image search. (I know what you are thinking, and you are wrong.) The reason I was so excited is because I entered my own name in the search box, and the very first image returned was my smiling face.

At some point in time, I switched to Yahoo for my searching, and now, like many others, I turn almost exclusively to Google. One thing I enjoy doing when I have some down time is Googling peoples names. I Google old friends, I Google new friends, I Google friends of friends, I Google business associates, I Google pretty much anyone that pops into my head. It’s funny that I do this, because I almost never find what I am looking for. It is rare to find any mention of anyone I Google. I occasionally think I have found the needle in the haystack only to find out that I was on a wild goose chase. What an exciting moment though, when I find bona fide information on the person of interest!

Now my goal has become to insure that anyone similarly Google-obsessed will be able to track me down by entering my name into that search engine. I initially started reading up on how to improve your ranking on Google as part of a work project, and I have now decided to apply it to my personal website to see if this Andrew Baxter can make it to number 1 on Google. My brother seems to have been smiled upon by the Google gods, his website is number 2 when you search his name (maybe this blog entry will push him over the top). My website sadly does not show up at all when you enter my name in Google. I have scrolled through the top 800 results on three separate occasions since I put my site up in hopes that I would be moving on up, but in three months my page has still not made an appearance. You can find my photo.net profile on page 3, and surprisingly my week-old blog on page 4 (thanks guys), but my actual website, that I have meticulously toiled over, sadly does not rank. On the upside, the Canadian version of Yahoo puts my site in the number 1 spot, but who uses Yahoo anymore?

So tonight I am appealing to the good crawlers at Google (I know you power blogger.com) to give a geek a break and give some credit to my little slice of the World Wide Web.

See you at the top.