Sunday, March 23, 2008

Google goes to warp speed, oddly fond of me

This morning I wrote a post about worrisome behavior associated with XPonlinescanner.com. At that time a search on the term led to the spammer's web site.

As of this evening a search on the same term leads to my blog post. This morning three people who ran into the same worrisome ad behavior left comments on my initial post -- they found it at the top of their searches within 15 minutes of the original posting.

This evening I posted about the frustrations of using iMovie '08 with a Flip Video camcorder. A few minutes after I posted it I decided to see if anyone else had discovered that Mike Ash's QTAmateur would translate the AVI files. I found exactly one post on the topic- mine.

Google indexed my blog post within 15 minutes of creation.

I then experimented with a post I made this evening to Apple's Discussion group. It too was indexed within 30 minutes of posting. That's nothing about me of course, Google is indexing that massive archive at an astounding speed.

This is unnerving on two levels. Personally it's unnerving that Google is so oddly fond of my blogs. They're not high readership blogs, though I do like to imagine my readership is unusually perceptive. Weird.

The personal focus is odd enough, but the indexing speed is even more uncanny. Google has quietly turned on a warp drive; how the heck are they able to index so quickly? What does this say about their bandwidth capacity -- that they're basically reading large portions of the net in almost real-time?

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