For a fleeting moment, this post takes pride of place at the top of my blog. It's the one post everyone reads (or at least looks at the first bit of and then decides not to read any further). It has some kind of importance and relevance, just for today. It might even get some comments. Tomorrow this post will be a bit further down, probably just off the bottom of the screen. Most people will already have read it and so won't bother to look at it again. People who've not logged in it today might find it tomorrow, but others will just read the new top post, unwilling to scroll down any further, and so will miss this one altogether. By next week this post will be so far down the page that most regular readers will have forgotten all about it and new visitors probably aren't going to find it at all. Within a couple of weeks this post will exist only in the archives, where it will be found and read only by those deliberately clicking on my September 2003 link. And there in the archives it will live, part of the history of diamond geezer, just one tiny gem in a forgotten hoard. Such is the lifecycle of a blogpost. And that's a pity.
Blogs are the curse of the search engine. You know this when you're a blogger because you get to see all the ludicrous search engine searches that bring people to your site. Yesterday I was the target for a Googler searching for "buying kitchen neasden", all because at some time in the last year those three words have appeared somewhere on this page at the same time. I've never written about kitchens in Neasden myself (if you come back looking again, it's IKEA you want mate), but I have written about buying things, about kitchens, and about Neasden. And therein lies the problem - us bloggers write about so many different things that our pages contain a seemingly random mix of words, all of which can be linked by an obscure search engine request. So, punters searching for something sensible all too often click through to blogs that include nothing on their chosen subject at all. And that's a pity.
But search engines are also the curse of the blog. Search engines often correctly direct people to a blog which has exactly what they're looking for, but then dump them uncermoniously at the top of the main page. It's bloody hard to find something in a blog when it's not right at the top. You arrive at a page knowing that the subject you're interested in is there somewhere, but then you discover that you have absolutely no idea exactly whereabouts it might be. Maybe a bit further down the page, if you can be bothered to look. Or maybe it's in the archives, in which case it's like looking for a needle in a haystack so you might as well give up now and go searching on someone else's page instead. Which is what happens all too often. And that's a pity.
Yesterday Google directed people to my blog who were looking for 'blue peter', 'former big brother house Bow' and 'cheapest 118', amongst other things. All three topics are dissected at length somewhere within diamond geezer, but I doubt that any of those visitors found the information they were looking for. I try to help, I really do. I keep a list down the right hand side of my page with links to all the most common searches, if anyone ever notices it. There's also a box where you can search the entire site, but only about five people use it every week. And then there's the rather splendid diamond geezer index, 2002 and 2003, a veritable linkfest of delights, but only if you realise it's worth clicking on. Which I doubt most visitors do. And that's a pity.
So, what's really needed is for search engines like Google to learn how to link to the right part of a blog. Every blog post is numbered (this one's the very catchy 106256883652801194) so each post is individually linkable. Bloggers know how to link to exactly the right post on other people's blogs, and do, so why can't search engines? In addition, it is possible for me to search my own blog perfectly well from insideBlogger. Using Blogger's internal search engine I can easily find, for example, that I've written precisely elevenposts containing the phrase "search engine". Why isn't this sort of search possible on normal search engines? Especially given that Google actually owns Blogger anyway. It should be a doddle for them to direct your enquiries to exactly the right post on exactly the right archive page. But, currently, it isn't. And then people might actually be able to find what they're looking for. But, currently, they don't. And that's a scandal.
