Looking for the next best thing

Why am I first?


This post is the latest in an irregular, navel-gazing series on searches that brought visitors here. Also, I predict the next wave in spam sites.

1. bush appoints chief justice

Google coughs up more than twelve million pages on this query, and my satirical blog post is number one. "Bush Appoints His Mountain Bike as Next Chief Justice" sits ahead of pages from unimportant sites like supremecourtus.gov, cnn.com, jurist.law.pitt.edu, and en.wikipedia.org. I don't understand. I did do a few things Google likes:

• I've written on the subject before (when I suggested someone Bush was even unlikelier to appoint);
• the post has the search words in the right order;
• even better, the search terms are in both the page's title and url;
• and there are links to authoritative sources (like Slate, several newspapers, and, especially, Wikipedia).

But the post also has something Google dislikes: there are no external links to it. Zero. Once upon a time, I complained that Google hated me. But this is a little more Google-love than I'm comfortable with, at least for this search. I suspect they're playing with their ranking algorithm, and things will soon return to normal.

2. what does riding shotgun mean
Second out of 1,300,000. The post title is "Riding shotgun", and the post's body has the word "mean", so the post's words are in the same order as the search.

3. ANWR map
4. chicago crime map
My top search referrers. The search term is in the post title, and there are links from other sites. Yes, I am a map geek.

6. beedogs
Sixth out of 24,000. Post title, and Wikipedia link.

7. grandiose behavior
Why third out of 583,000? Because I am such a good example of it! I am the bestest example of it EVAR! (Well, third bestest.) "Grandiose behavior" isn't in the title of my post, but is at the start of a list. Also, there's a Wikipedia link.

8. hermione elf liberty
First out of 22,000. The search words appear in tables. And there's a W-pedia link.

9. anders celsius college education
First of 24,000. Yeah, there's a Whiskeypedia link. But the keywords are in two different posts. The posts are consecutive, but Google may need to improve its recognition of implied delimiters, since horizontal lines, <div> tags , and dates are often used to separate fields and records (but not always, because that would be too convenient). A good implied record separator for blogs is a link to a page on the same host containing all the text immediately preceding (or following, depending on layout).

10. gold smelter design
Fortieth out of 256,000. I mentioned a gold smelter in one post, and two weeks earlier I had blogged on intelligent design. Another separator problem. If I'd stuck in a Wikipedia link, it would have been fourth instead of fortieth, I betcha.

11. Famous incidents of book burning
Second out of 7.1 million. I haven't written on this topic, but I write about books a lot, and I've mentioned book-burning in passing. This looks like Google teasing out meaning that isn't quite there.

12. sucka dj's who think they're fly!
Fourth of 26,000. I'm glad to rank so highly on such a crucial issue.

13. tom delay mugshot
Twelfth of 146,000. Another case where Google likes post titles — alt text, too. Tom DeLay is not my favorite mugshot, though. Cops suspected this guy of huffing spraypaint. What do you think gave him away?

---

Not a lot of suspense here. The next wave in spam sites is gratuitous Wikipedia links. As spamdexers and splogs grow more evil, their links will become ever more useless. We just have to come up with a name for their tactic. Wikipedophelia? What do you think?

Wingnuts

The Illinois primary is today. The Republican candidates in the 8th congressional district have been running hard. The historically-Republican district (Philip Crane for decades, before him, Donald Rumsfeld) is represented by freshman Democrat Melissa Bean, and is considered a top pickup opportunity for the Republicans. I doubt the Republicans will take the seat back, because the tide is against them, but the winner would have a good start in the Republican House — the primary campaign is expensive, vicious, and stupid.

The two major candidates, Kathy Salvi and David McSweeney, are trying to win the primary by running to each other's right. The result is that they get bunched up together, almost indistinguishable on the fringe. They're afraid to attack each other for being too conservative. And there may be no such thing, at least in the primary. But they are so far out on the edge that every attack makes its target sound reasonable and responsible — almost like a Democrat. This rosy picture isn't reliable, though. If you look at what they say about themselves, each snaps back into focus as your standard wingnut.

Most of the charges and counter-charges have been broadcast on TV and radio. Ad nauseam: Each candidate has dumped more than a million dollars of personal money into the race. They don't have the guts to put their own hit pieces online, though. From their opponents' advertising, it sounds as though

• McSweeney isn't insanely opposed to abortion. (He actually is, though. He's just slightly less anti-choice than Salvi.)

• Salvi might show insufficient deference to the whims of big corporations. (She's a personal-injury lawyer. But she supports tort "reform".)

• Neither Salvi nor McSweeney is true to the legacy of Ronald Reagan. (Wrong. They were both baptized in the festering juices of Reagan's corpse.)

If, instead of relying on their opponents' attack ads, you look at their own material, you'll see them both parrot the failed Republican orthodoxy:

• Fix the deficit by cutting taxes.

• Fix Social Security by killing it.

• Fix Iraq by wishing for a pony — wishing really hard.

It's as formulaic as spam email promising you a naked, eighteen-year mortgage, but not as well-crafted.

Just as spammers who depart from their templates become even more obviously fake, Republicans who depart from their templates become even less convincing. When Salvi and McSweeney don't follow the blueprint, they show how confused they are by taking stands that feel good, but don't tie in with the rest of the message. Salvi takes a controversial stand on traffic congestion. She's against it. McSweeney hates child molesters almost as much as he hates trial lawyers like Salvi. These programs (well, implied programs; they're too savvy to offer any specifics) may sound good, but neither fits with its candidate's alleged principles. Salvi doesn't explain how she'll bring home major pork while cutting spending to the bone everywhere else — and we're talking huge gobbets of pork to address the district's traffic problems, the kind of pork that brand-new congress-critters don't get anywhere near. McSweeney wants to introduce federal laws for state crimes, yet he claims he wants to return power to the states. And he will somehow reduce the burden of pointless federal regulation by passing unnecessary laws.

Most of what the Republican candidates say is either horrid or inane. But there's also what they don't say. They talk about the deficit. They talk about getting the troops in Iraq the materiel they need. They talk about cleaning up the mess in Washington. But they never mention whose fault it all is. They never mention the elephant in the room, the Republican party. The Republicans created the mess in Washington. Sending more Republicans will only make it worse.

Driving blind

In the Bush administration, bureaucratic stupidity can be a design feature (you don't really need me to give examples, do you?). Elsewhere, bureaucratic stupidity is usually a bug, an emergent property when a well-intended program gets poorly-considered implementation.

My old favorite was a classic example. A classmate had reported on a questionnaire that his family sometimes spoke Spanish at home. So he got pulled out of class for testing, to see whether he would benefit from instruction in English as a Second Language. So far, nice and proactive. But he got yanked from an advanced placement English class, which means he was pulled from a subject where he was in the 98th percentile so that he could be tested for a program designed to improve his skills, in that very area, all the way up to maybe the 25th percentile. It was a complete waste of time, both his and the tester's. Plus, there was the opportunity cost of not using the resource for a kid who actually needed it. But my friend only missed one class, so all in all, the waste was small, cheap, and amusing. Every bureaucratic foul-up should be like that.

I have a new favorite bureaucratic foolishness. The state of Illinois requires that all high school districts offer driver's education. Given the large number of people who apparently don't know what a red octagon means, this can only be considered a good thing. Chicago Public Schools go further, requiring driver's ed for graduation. Since a car crash is the likeliest cause of my accidental demise, and I would prefer to avoid such an event, making driver's ed mandatory is even better. But CPS might be just a liiiittle too enthusiastic. They require everybody to pass driver's ed, even the blind kids. Yes, the blind kids. Read the story in the Chicago Tribune.

The chairman of the Illinois High School/College Driver's Education Association says it's not a waste of time. But even he, presumably a big booster of driver's ed, concedes that it may lack "a little common sense." I suppose you could argue that it also teaches the kids a healthy disrespect for authority, but high school already does that, and splendidly.

There's actually something surprising about this whole incident — a positive outcome. This silliness is being used as a teaching moment. The kids are writing to their aldermen and other elected officials. The requirement will surely be eased. So the kids will have the experience of petitioning the government for redress of grievances and of making a difference, however small, in their own lives. Nice.