83 & Ganguly: www.google-y.com

Google can be weird at times. You must have read about the search-engine throwing up Bush/White House as the top search for the keyword failure. My google story is hardly that interesting or newsworthy, but interesting none the less.

Now a certain Saurav Ganguly happens to be my favourite cricketer and I hardly ever miss a chance to write about him on my cricket blog. Unfortunately i completely missed the December 7th, Potchefstroom story. I was away in Lucknow, on work, and by the time I could spare some time for my blog, the story had been written and re-written about a thousand times already. Lesser fans of Saurav had dissected the innings already and i was absolutely disheartened at missing the biggest Saurav innings in recent times. That's when i typed in the keywords Ganguly & 83 on the Google search window, and got a story!

You would expect the world's leading search engine to throw up cricinfo or some other popular cricket or news site or a general portal as the top search. Funnily enough, that was not the case - the #1 search result was a site called Nagalandpost . A site which mainly deals with an entirely different area had pushed the world's leading cricket portal to the number 2 slot for a cricket keyword.

Now, Nagaland is a tiny state located in India's extreme east, ensconsed between my home state, Assam and Myanmar. Nagaland has no known history of cricket, and even though Nagaland is a part of cricket-crazy India, it has no official cricket team, nor has any Naga player ever come even remotely close to playing for India. More Nagas follow cock-fighting than cricket!! That's why google's search result becomes all the more intriguing.

How do the Google's spiders go about doing their business? Surely, cricinfo has a far higher percentage of relevant keywords for cricket. Surely, cricinfo is far better linked by other cricket and Saurav Ganguly related sites. Qualitatively too, cricinfo would outscore Nagalandpost comprehensively, cricket-wise or otherwise. In terms of pageviews and traffic, Cricinfo is ranked amongst the world's leading 1000 websites. Nagalandpost is far, far behind.

Whatever way you think, this looks more than a little intriguing. Does the answer lie in the second keyword "83"? I don't know.....

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post-script:

just in case you are thinking yahoo, yahoo doesn't behave as weirdly for the keyword/s. No google-ys at yahoo as there is no sign of nagalandpost.com, at least not on the first results page. Cricinfo is where it should be, followed by news-sites and portals.