Funny Google Thing
I have been watching with some amusement the growing number of comments at this old post of mine (about the recording of that guy trying to cancel his AOL account) from people who are actually trying to cancel some kind of account. I guess I can see how you could make that mistake if you were really not an internet person, but I really couldn’t figure out how everyone was finding their way to that post. But this morning I googled “cancel my account” and guess what’s the number one result? Thanks Google.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Dude, you totally need to put some comments and links in there to other places on your site!
May 11th, 2007 at 7:03 am
The text that Google highlights is this comment on the post:
# Jeremy Says:
June 17th, 2006 at 9:40 am
Will there be a JoCo “Please Cancel My Account†song? Then people could just call up AOL and play it over the phone, and it would save everyone a lot of aggravation.
I think Google’s trying to send you a message.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:28 am
I had a thread on my old blog site like this.
It was a very small blog community, but regardless, one of the blogs had the title, “Naked, Hungry, and Lost in the Woods”. One of his blog posts was about Final Fantasy and he posted something about Yuna. Well, combine the title of the blog, with something about Yuna, and in a matter of days, we somehow climbed the top of the listings for “naked yuna pics”.
In no time at all the comments section of that blog was SWAMPED with some VERY pissed off horn-dogs looking for nude pictures of an animated female video game character. It was very very sad.
Shortly after that, I started getting hit with spammers in the same thread which spread to the rest of the community. I then had to enforce sign-ons to the site in order to make comments.
Crazy stuff I tell ya. But at least I found lots of places to play on-line poker and get cheap v1gra and c1al1s.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:50 am
I feel sorry for AOL users. You have to be pretty dumb to think this site is a place you could cancel your account though…or maybe they are just that desprate to cancel…which is completly understandable.
May 11th, 2007 at 8:48 am
I see this sort of thing all the time. I run a site with reviews of employers, and a while ago someone did a Google search for a particular game company they were having trouble with and ended up on my site. They then went to the trouble to create an account and post the following: http://coderific.com/forums/posts/356?start=0
“I order a gamei did not get and you took $ 50.00 out of my account and iwant it back tonight and a answer to night Patricia Smith at MermaidLady @comcast.net”
I’ve also gotten a number of emails from rather irate people demanding refunds from this game company.
May 11th, 2007 at 10:00 am
That’s actually pretty sad. Looks like it’s not (just?) AOL, several people are looking to cancel something named “hi5″, looks like a MySpace ripoff. nd of course, someone’s trying to cancel MySpace.
Since you’ve become a cancellation expert, you should contact John Hodgman, I hear he’s been trying to cancel his MySpace account.
May 11th, 2007 at 10:02 am
That’s because you’re famous, Jon.
May 11th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I don’t mean to burst any bubbles, but it’s sampling bias. For example, I also stumbled across a similar FGT where you get a picture of me screaming if you do an image search on “windows programming”. Interesting, yes, but I didn’t *try* to become a poster child for that phrase. That it to say, just about *any* unique site in Google will have a particular set of words that distinguishes it from everyone else. Because we work backwards in ego surfing like that, we all have a FGT out there waiting to be found.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
I used to have the top image search for “pie” sadly, no more.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Hahahahaha.
That’s ridiculous.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Oh man. I don’t think we can blame Google for this. Google may have made you the innocent bystander victim, but the stupidity crossfire was preexisting.
May 16th, 2007 at 9:00 am
A good pagerank has many advantages, and your’s isn’t bad at all
that’s probably one of the reasons you ranked so high.
May 8th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
I’m actually running a blog where I collect comment threads where this kind of misunderstanding is happening — gumbaby.com . It’s part of my dissertation research. So I was thrilled to find this thread! Can anyone here point me at other pages where this is happening (I’ll look at everything that’s already on this page)? Referral logs would also be great if people are keeping them and can send them along to me.