Thursday, November 18, 2010

Why the Cox-Merz Rule?

There are some aspects of blogging and Google searches that I do not understand (and not trying to be disrespectful of the intelligence of my audience who I don't think will understand it either), there are certain search terms that attract people to this blog. The biggest ones: "cox-merz" and "cox-merz rule". Why? I have written about the rule just a little bit, but never would expect it to be such a hit - always somewhere in the top five or so depending on the details of the search.

But then try "rheology blog" and the top result is for the Zimbio blog which hasn't had a contribution in over 4 years. "The Rheol World" is near the top, but I can't find this blog anywhere.

5 comments:

孙尉翔 said...

As you've mentioned you did blog about the rule, I clicked into the link.

John said...

I should have thought about this.

It's like when someone tells to not think about the color blue - of course that it the only color you will think about.

Eric F. Brown said...

I've noticed the same thing. I'm not sure why mine keeps turning up, unless Google is supplying a judgment on quality :). Some of this has to do with the words that we use directly in our posts, which I discussed briefly in July.
The search term "rheology blogs" does bring your site up. I'm not sure why the addition of one letter makes such a difference in search output.
Anyway, the top random search phrase that leads people to me is an image search on "kevlar chemical structure."

Eric F. Brown said...

Update--I see you on page 1 of Google with this post! The squeaky wheel gets the grease!

Anonymous said...

That's funny it. It seems that most of my hits are coming from searches for "Chrissie Hynde."