Our Google Fame

Welcome to my first new blog post in almost two years!  This one's short and just tells a funny story, hope you enjoy.  Also, I started posting on Storylane, a website where you share stories and will likely cross blog the more story oriented of my posts there as well as here.  Hope everybody is well.  On to the story.

Last night as we were watching some TV and discussing whether we should go to bed soon, my wife checked her e-mail and saw that somebody had posted a comment on our family blog.  What's interesting is that this was the third post from a complete stranger on a blog she had written about us installing new carpet in our home.  The fact that complete strangers were commenting on our blog became even more perplexing when we discovered that some of the recent visitors to the small family blog my wife keeps for us were from the United Kingdom and the Philippines.  What was bringing these people to our blog and causing them to comment?

Luckily, blogs these days let you look at the sources of traffic and analyze your outreach.  This wasn't something we'd done before on this blog as we weren't too concerned with driving traffic there, other than from friends and family.  After discovering the international flavor of some of our visitors we tried to see where they were linking to us from.  It quickly became apparent that we were Google's second result after running a search for "vacuum marks on carpet."
This was the second time I've been part of what I call Google Fame and the first time I got to share it with my wife.  Google Fame isn't real fame, and it isn't even Internet Fame as achieved by YouTube celebrities and others of similar ilk.  No, what I call Google Fame is when you discover that something you have written or in some other way contributed to the Internet becomes one of the top hits on Google.  There's something amazing about finding out that some little piece that you created has been seen throughout the world because something you wrote matched up just right with Google's search algorithm.
About four years ago I wrote a blog post where I explained the fallacy of the suppressed correlative in order to demonstrate a point.  To my surprise I found that I was getting visitors from throughout the world to my little personal blog.  As I investigated why I had people visiting my blog from so many places, I discovered that if you did a search for the "fallacy of the suppressed correlative" I was the top hit on Google.  Sadly, this is no longer true, you have to go to the second page of results to find my blog when you search for the "fallacy of the suppressed correlative" now.
I don't think that either Stephanie's blog now or my blog then were visited by a lot of people.  "Vacuum marks on carpet" and "fallacy of the suppressed correlative" are probably not the most common search terms and likely haven't led to that many people our little corners of the Internet.  But there's something really amazing about accidentally becoming one of the top hits for a random search term on Google.  Sometimes it's fun to have a little bit of Google Fame.

Addendum (02 December 2012 10:07 AM) - My friend Jessica Donbrosky shared some Google fame that she has experienced in the comments here.  If you have ever had Google fame, I'd love to hear about it!  Please feel free to comment.