Google Juice

On Saturday night there was a spike of hits on Fractals of Change. Everybody must be trying the Probability Puzzle, I thought, or maybe the entire group of UN scientists have decided to see what I wrote about the role of skepticism in science.

Not!

The hits were on a two year old post about a local Verizon outage in Mantoloking. The traffic was coming from Google and a little research showed why.

The first link on Google (not counting the Verizon Wireless ad) when you type “Verizon Outage” is my old post.

But why now?

Turns out there was some sort of BlackBerry outage. Verizon users thought it was their network, at&t users thought it was theirs, etc. People who wanted to know what was going on Googled. If they went far enough down on the page, they did find links to bulletin boards where there was enough information to learn that there was some sort of widespread problem.

Apparently the problem was short-lived because the surge in hits disappeared as quickly as it came.

Couple of interesting points:

1. People come to Google when they want to know what’s going on. It’s faster than turning on the TV or even accessing the more-slowly updated sites of web services.
2. Although Google works in this role – at least when the scale of something is large enough or the query specific enough, Google doesn’t specifically answer the question of what’s happening NOW. It gave an historic rather than current view of “Verizon outages”.
3. The Google algorithm is actually weighted against very current postings because it gives weight to the number of links (historic) to the site containing the Googled words and links, like moss, take time to accumulate.
4. The Google algorithm gives my blog  a fair amount of Google juice because there are an eclectic mix of better-read blogs which link to it from time to time or have Fractals of Change in their blogroll. It apparently doesn’t distinguish between cases where I really have expertise and those where I’m just pontificating or storytelling (good thing for me).
5. There’s a business opportunity for a site which infers events from incoming query streams and solicits input from those who query. “We’ve been getting a lot of hits about a ‘Verizon outage’. Click here to see the duration, geographic extent, and symptoms reported by others. The term ‘BlackBerry outage’ may be correlated. Please help others by supplying details of any problem you may be having.”
6. The URLs for whatshappening.com and whatsup.com are already taken; I checked:-}