Not that I care, but...

A self indulgent post here. 

I've noticed on some recent Googling for this blog just using "Opinion Dominion" that it now lists first the podcast called The Opinion Dominion that started in 2020 and is about this:  

Two old Linux/Unix/OpenSource guys talk about the past and future of *nix, Open Source and other Tech related things.  

They have put out 67 episodes, and while I can't tell for sure how much of a following they have, I note that a Youtube channel where they posted their first episodes has 18 subscribers.   Searching for any comment about the podcast anywhere, I'm not turning up anything.   Hence, I'm suspecting it's a hobby for two guys to make it, but I seriously doubt that they have much of a listening audience.  

(By the way there is also a The Opinion Dominion Youtube channel that was created in 2014 and has no content, at all.   It also has a completely inactive Twitter/X account.  Odd, hey?)  

Not long after they started, I actually tried to send a message to the podcast saying that people searching for them might get confused, as my blog has been around for a long time and comes up high on Google search, so maybe the name might be changed?   I didn't get a reply.

Anyhow, it's no great skin off my nose, as I don't worry about who reads this:  but it is interesting to check how the Google search algorithm treats me.

The answer:  not very well, given I now have to go to page three of the Google search results to find myself.  Even searching "Opinion Dominion blog" doesn't help, with the AI part sometimes still referring to the above podcast as a blog - which it definitely isn't.

AND BY THE WAY:      I know from professional experience that the Google/Gemini AI search answers to specific questions in my line of work are quite often specifically (and confidently) wrong.   I have had a client ring me to check something because of what they had seen in the AI search answer.   Perplexity, on the other hand, was perfectly correct when asked the same question, and I keep recommending it to people as the most accurate and check-able AI service I know.

Oddly enough, searching "Opinion Dominion" on Bing, Brave and DuckDuckGo search engines brings my blog as the first answer and the podcast below me.   That's how things should be (ha!); but what I find peculiar is that Google search dropped me despite being a blog hosted on their own site (Blogspot), and as I noted in September last year, it seems this place has bursts of hits from bots and crawlers (half a million in a day!), perhaps related to training LLM's, but this hasn't helped at all in search rankings.

So, I just find this all pretty peculiar.  Maybe trying to go back to posting every day might help?  :)  

Meh, doesn't matter...