Google Declares Sister Website "great website"

It's official! My travel blog has been given the extraordinary epithet "great website" by the all-knowing Google. Actually, it wasn't Google, but a search user.

I was digging through my Analytics report this morning and saw this gem:
This says that someone found my website by searching for the term "great website". Two someone, actually. While that is a great compliment, a little looking revealed that it was because I linked to National Geographic's Picture of the Day site and called it great.

I searched the first 20 pages of Google results for my website but couldn't find it. I figured that the people who found the site by that link must have looked awful hard for it. But then I realized that their results were likely different from mine the way the search giant's algorithms work. From what I've read, they calculate probabilities of what you're actually looking for using your unique site visits to guide them. All of this is really just a fancy way of saying "Google tracks you."

There's probably a good post to be made about how Google's privacy policies leave you vulnerable to all kinds of information disclosure vulnerabilities. Or about how these meta search words can be skewed in subtle ways to target less sophistocated users with malware. But I don't have the time right now to work those up, so use those analytical skills I've been urging you to develop.