Fun With Search Engines...

For a multiplicity of reasons, I've been running a lot of tests on search engine results. Last night, just out of curiosity to see what actually got the best Google rankings (at least at that moment in time), I did a Google search on "vampire." Not surprisingly, that term returned 39,400,000 hits. I wanted to see, first, what a person who typed "vampire" into Google would immediately be presented with; and second, how close to the top any "real vampire" sites were, and which sites were top rated. What I saw was...interesting.

The top-rated Google site for "vampire" is the Wikipedia page with that name, dealing with vampire folklore. Next came Vampire Wine, which I believe is the old domain that used to be Pathway to Darkness, and hence may be riding on that now long-vanished site's extensive linkage and popularity. Then VampireRave.com, which is a commercial Goth/punk site aimed at Lifestylers and vampire fans more than vampiric people. Then came the two main pages for Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: Requiem at White Wolf Games. Then the Skeptic's Dictionary page on "vampire," which links Sanguinarius.org and Dr. Elizabeth Miller's Dracula page. A technical page was number 7, then VampireFreaks.com, which is a very disturbing site. 9th and 10th on the first page of hits were Sanguinarius.org and Temple of the Vampire. So, two "real vampire" sites appeared among the first 10 hits.

The second page started with two gaming sites, "the vampire random name generator" and the "vampire" section in the site "How Stuff Works," titled "How Vampires Work." This is kind of sketchy, and has a handful of links that need updating. (Among other things, it links a page on this site that is no longer there.) But the fifth entry, the vampire section on Monstrous.com, is a candidate for my Hall of Shame--it's entirely plagiarized! I started to read it and immediately recognized big chunks of text from my old "Human Living Vampires" articles and from Sanguinarius' site, all just jumbled together without attribution or credit. The whole section consists of unashamedly ripped off material. The rest of the page was technical sites, gaming sites, and VampireMeetups.com.

The technical sites are intriguing. There seems to be a trend to name technical products, businesses or projects "vampire" something. There was "Vampire, an extension module for mod_python," "Net Vampire, a file download manager," "VAMPIRE--Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval," and "Vampire Wire," an online store for cables and wiring.

The third page of Google hits included Damien Deville's organization The Vampire Church, and one of my friend Bev's articles on vampire myths. It also contained Vampire Wear, the IMDb page for "John Carpenter's Vampires," a gaming site, a photographer's gallery site, the spoof website "Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency," and the website for the band Vampire Weekend.

And so it went, for pages and pages. Very few serious information sites or real vampire sites appeared among the top, say, 200. Obviously, anyone running a Google search on just the word "vampire" is going to have a hard time finding much information of substance--and not because the information isn't on the 'Net. But Google's method of ranking sites is not angled toward returning the highest quality material. Apparently, it's related primarily to the number of links a site has from other "important" websites.

The results from the same search on Yahoo! are entirely different. Yahoo! returns far more hits, 54,100,000, to start with. The first site on the list is Vampires Among Us, followed by Vampires Only, Dr. Miller's Dracula Page, Sanguinarius.org, Beverly Richardson's Vampire's Vault, and Vampyres Online. By Light Unseen is number 11, top of the second page, and with the correct name. Google still lists us as "Living Vampires," which hasn't been the site's name since 2002. (It still comes up if you Google By Light Unseen, however). Unfortunately, Yahoo! also returns Monstrous.com on the first page of hits, so I really will be contacting Monstrous about their little copyright problem. But the bottom line is: Yahoo! returns a much more substantial assortment of websites at the top of a simple keyword search than Google does.

"Angel"--the story continues:

On the heels of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" comics (or graphic novel) series, Joss Whedon is producing a comics series picking up the plotline of "Angel" after the television series finale's cliffhanger ending.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2007/09/return-of-the-v.html?csp=34

I'm tempted to say something about a line drawing of David Boreanaz having more range than the actor does...but I'll be nice. There are some sample pages of the comic available on Ain't It Cool News, it looks quite handsomely done.

"Paper Sang" posting on YouTube

I discovered via the VCMB messageboard that a person going by the name of LilyCerise is posting a series of short, very simple videos (they're sort of like animated Power Point presentations really--the author does not appear in them) about "True Vampirism" on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/LilyCeriseShe also has a "True Vampirism" Wiki page at http://truevampires.wetpaint.com/?t=anon. Being a "Wetpaint Wiki," anyone who registers with Wetpaint can contribute to the page.

I am kind of curious as to who LilyCerise actually is--links on the Wiki page so far include Sanguinarius.org, the House Kheperu site and Darkness Embraced. The information that LilyCerise gives in her videos is consistent with that on dozens of realvamp websites, and except for her promotion of the "psi-feeding" or "energy feeding" illusion, I see no problems with it. Some people on the VCMB seem to be concerned about LilyCerise "acting as a spokesperson" which I don't think she's doing any more than anyone else on the 'Net. After all, if it wasn't for the people like Sangi, Sphynxcat, M&D, Saras, LadyCG and me who have been maintaining websites and forums, even publishing books, for all these years, none of those folks on the VCMB would even be there.

I'm darned if I know what the nickname "Paper Sang" refers to, though!

Blood drinker achieves international fame!

International newswires have been carrying this item:

"Vampire" arrested for stealing and drinking blood at hospital

I wonder if this fellow even knew what he was drinking, or if he was so drunk, he thought they were shooters of something? I certainly hope the female patient wasn't being tested for something really nasty...