j’s scratchpad

Gosh, I mention Blair Hornstine on my blog and suddenly, this blog is all over the place.

I’ve been quoted on the Russian Legs blog (which, by the way, doesn’t work in Netscape on a Mac). Someone scrolled through six pages of search results in Google to get here. AT&T’s Worldnet search returns me on their first page of hits. I love the search string “high school valedictorian who plagiarized.” (Quotes are mine.) CNN’s Web search also returns my homepage in their top list of results with the search “valedictorian law suit harvard.” (Quotes are mine.) Harvard’s search engine, which is still probably my favorite for searching blogs because it goes deeper than the front page (you can actually get to the URL with the date of the post, not quite the permalink, but darn close), has me twice in their three hits.

I think these results are interesting because 1) it might reflect that there isn’t much out there about Blair on the Web and people are getting to me because this blog is one of the few sites that has something about her on it and 2) I didn’t think a lot of people really cared about plagiarism outside of the organizations or individuals directly impacted by it. (Of course, people probably aren’t searching for things about Blair because of plagiarism.) Too bad we still can’t really get to the meaning behind the searches, i.e. why people were looking for information about Blair in the first place and why they used the search parameters they did.

By the way, contrary to Internet rumors, I did not have a sex change and I am not directly affiliated with Harvard Law School. They currently host blogs for the Harvard community. That’s all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2003 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.