Jeni's Musings

Yes, I certainly hope no one’s taking it too seriously, just seems a vaguely amusing way to augment a bit of ego-surfing.

On the “John Smith” test, I can see why it might not score particularly low. If there are over 2 megahits on John Smith and a page about you is in the top 30 then there must be quite a lot about you on the web (if you average 1/30, then that’s over 6.5 megahits, and the fact that you’ve got a page in the top 30 is fairly impressive given that number of hits). If it was one page from the top 30 and there were only 60 hits overall, that would be worse, at a guess.

Similarly, although you only have 10/30 of the hits on John Cowan, there are 2,220,000 of them, equating to 740,000 pages. The bottom line is that you have a well established online presence, and it’s not hard to locate pages about you, so I’d say that the 10/10 is not unreasonable.