Yeasty Madrid

There was a time when getting a site indexed on a major search engine was seriously hard - I used to derive a major part of my income from doing just that. At the time, the major search engine was Yahoo!, and their largely hand-edited directory was drowning under the number of submissions. After a while they thought they could monetize the operation by charging for 'express' listing. But you were still looking at an index that was only updated every one or two months. Then Google came along and changed everything. It indexes pretty much everything that gets published on the web. And pretty quickly too.

The reason I'm writing this wibble is that I just Googled 'bread yeast Madrid', and was seriously, I mean seriously surprised to find a link to my previous story in the number one position. I only posted it half an hour ago! This is just utterly, gob-smackingly amazing.

A couple of years ago, on my Dubai blog, I had a try at 'Google-bombing': this is a game where you try to get top rankings for a particular phrase. I chose the phrase 'disingenuous tosh.' Actually, it chose itself, given some of the garbage spouted by UAE government officials. But guess what: it's still number one!