One of the funny things about Google’s Page Rank algorithm is that because it uses the words on linking pages to choose what pages are returned in search results, it tells you what somebody else thinks about a site without telling you who thinks that.
Admittedly, that sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Let’s start over. Remember Google-bombing? It’s the process by which you cause a site to turn up in Google’s search results for a certain phrase by linking to the site with those words. For instance, if you search for miserable failure in Google, you’re likely to get George W. Bush’s bio from whitehouse.gov. Why? Because people like me have linked to that page with those words.
What’s interesting about this is that the words “miserable” and “failure” don’t appear on that page. Mostly, when we search, we have the idea that the search terms we use will turn up on the page. In fact, Google’s toolbar will highlight the places where search terms show up on the page. But that doesn’t always happen.
Which brings us to why I’m talking about all of this.
A while back I posted about how I didn’t like the way that Joe Clark was throwing around the words “autistic” and “aspgergerian” to describe (and denigrate, in my mind) people he doesn’t think have much in the way of social skills. (What insulting people, which Joe and I are known for, says about one’s social skills is left as a question for the reader.) Joe, every bit as gracious as I, linked to me in his recent article about Zoom Layouts with the phrase ‘Jemaleddin “JOE HATES DYSLEXICS” Cole.’
Of course, because he was talking about Zoom layouts, he linked to my Auto Zoom GreaseMonkey script and not the article where I criticized him for being rude to autistics. So guess what the number one result is for the Google search I hate dyslexics? That’s right, a page that never mentions dyslexia or hatred. Of course, by the time of the next Google Dance, this page will probably take that spot.
In other words, because of a complicated series of events, my page will now be the primary site for people who dislike those afflicted with slydexia. Errr… Dylsexia. Whatever. Sorry.
Not that it’ll be of any use to my regular users, but I modified Jeremy Keith’s Zoom bookmarklet to turn it into a Greasemonkey script. For more info, check out Jeremy’s article on the bookmarklet. And if you happen to be a reduced vision user that would benefit from such a thing, get Greasemonkey and install this script:
UPDATE: After thinking about it, and without asking Jeremy, I made an updated version of the script that checks to see if it found a zoom stylesheet, and if it doesn’t, applies a simplified version of Jeremy’s high-contrast zoom.css file. (This also involved lifting code from whoever wrote the DailyKos Attention script.) Give it a try:
UPDATE: (02/08/2006) Joe Clark doesn’t hate dyslexics, to my knowledge. But he’s kind of a dick to autistics. Smart guy though.