Sat 11/04/2006Ranked #5!We have attained our goal! On 10/29, just 19 days after starting off at rank #78 on Google under the query "John Lehmann", www.jplehmann.com is now ranked #5. The irony is that I believe my interest in tracking my own page is what has caused it to rise. If read back to the 10/10 post, the experiment began when I created a keyword rich paragraph in the hopes that this would boost my rankings with various queries. As of today, Google has still not re-indexed my page it appears. The second prong of my attack was to have my friends link to my page. My friend Andy's page was reindexed with links to mine on 10/14, but there was no apparent jump in the rankings at that time. The third prong of my attack was to become listed on dmoz.org, and last I checked it still hadn't made it in yet. On 10/10 I also created a script which would each day. If you watch the ranks, you'll see that I gradually progressed in each of the queries to my current state. There was no large jump. I think there could be two reasons for this. First, Google uses a complex scoring system which must be continually adjusting the values of each page. Because a page's score is dependent on the scores of those pages pointing to it, it makes sense that the ranks would continually shift. However, I have another theory which I am buying into at the moment. I believe that it is my script which performs queries each day which is driving my page to the top. At first glance, this doesn't seem possible. How would querying on "john lehmann" help me more than anyone else? But the other queries each contain a context keyword which is relevant to my page. Probably there aren't that many queries on John Lehmann (JL) each day, such that even my 20 queries a day could be noticed. I believe that Google might learn to associate each of the context keywords I am submitting with the keywords "john lehmann". In other words, Google may learn that the JL which people are interested in is also related to Dallas, UTD, LCC, etc. Finally when the core query "john lehmann" is submitted, Google may boost this page because it seems to have context for a popular JL. Maybe that is far fetched, but it does seem to account the gradual, continual boosting of my page to the top of the rankings for a number of queries. Later I will post a chart showing the change over time. I could test this theory by creating some other page, and changing no other variables other than querying on it each day. I believe this would only work though for a keyword sequence which is fairly uncommon. What has been attained out of all of this? Well, for one thing if someone wants to find me on Google, now they have a much better chance of spotting me since I'm on the first page, instead of on the 7th page. Second, I may have learned a trick for boosting a page's rank, but this needs further proof. One thing is almost for sure... There is no other page on the web that has the name John Lehmann on it as many times as this one does!!! I hope no one finds this too vain -- I'm just trying to learn, and make my page locatable. :) Perceived Versus Actual Risks One interest of mine is the relation between statistics and psychology. Some problems in probability and statistics seem so counterintuitive. Here's an interesting article I found on Slashdot: "Encryption guru Bruce Schneier takes a look at perceived and actual risks with some insightful commentary on how warped the public perception of risks may be: '...we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.'" Wed 10/25/2006Most Popular Keywords?John maybe? Lehmann? No. Can you guess? No you can't. But thanks to the amazingly cool free eXTReMe tracking service I am using (see Saturn looking logo at bottom of page), I can see all kinds of information, such as what keywords people used to find this site. The 3 keywords that have attacted the most unique visitors? Girls Gone Grabbin. That's right. See the 4/6/06 entry for clarification. I plugged these keywords into Yahoo, and sure enough -- hit number 35 is this page. Yahoo has apparently steered us 67% of the traffic compared to Google's 33%. There's your jplehmann.com ranking trivia for the day. Tue 10/24/2006We're 2nd Class Now!!Jplehmann.com fans... Those of you who have been following our Google ranking reports over the last few day have been elated. On 10/20, our main query jumped from 70 to 44, while at the same time securing the #1 spot with "texas". Then, on 10/21 the main query jumped to the 15th position!! (would be the 2nd page, or 2nd class, a non-power user). "LCC" has also climbed to #2, second to an academic paper citing a paper of mine. What caused this jump? The cached version seems to still be Sept 27, which hasn't changed (it hasn't eaten my new page with all the fancy keywords). Also, if I query "link:jplehmann.com", there are zero results (query for "who links here"). Although, I'm skeptical about that one because I've tried it on much larger pages and also seen no results. One thing I noticed is that it has now indexed my main domain name - jplehmann.com. As cited on 10/10, it had only two of my specific pages (index.html and index1.html). Perhaps I got a big boost by owning my own top-level domain (but what changed?). All and all, I wouldn't consider this to be too bad. "John Lehmann" isn't an uncommon name -- it produces 46,700 hits on Google. John Lehmanns who are more prominent than myself include:
Thu 10/19/2006See If You Can Find Me
You probably don't think that I can force this towel down your throat. But trust me, I can. All the way. Except I'd hold onto this one little bit at the end. When your stomach starts to digest it, I pull it out. Taking your stomach lining with it. For most people it would take about a week to die. It's very painful. -- Jack Bauer Rankings Ah ha, we broke into the 60s... for a day. :) "Texas" went from 5 to 6... Slow progress? Wed 10/11/2006A Vanity Boost?I notice that first thing this morning, my ranking has already increased from 78 to 72. Could this be due to the fact that I've been clicking my own link a number of times? Looks like they do have the mechanism to report click-thru traffic: However this also sounds way too easy to be worth many ranking points. But, maybe it can get me up to the level of a forum posting I made in April of 2001 titled, "problem compiling with g++ - procedure entry point getrlimit can't be found in cygwin1.dll", which doesn't even have a solution in it, but is is ranked #19. Maybe people are clicking on that. A Few Good Links In my war against all other John Lehmann pages, I have enlisted the aid of several noble and talented mercenaries. Three of my friends, fellow Language Computer Corporation (LCC) comrads, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) colleagues have made pointers from their personal pages:
Tue 10/10/2006A Shameless IR ExperimentThe only purpose of this paragraph about John Lehmann is to create a keyword dense paragraph for the hopes of better indexing of this personal home page or webpage in search engines. John Lehmann grew up in Richardson, Texas, just outside of Dallas, attending J.J. Pearce High School. He then went to the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) studying Computer Science as a Chi Phi, and now John P. Lehmann works at Language Computer Corporation (LCC) developing Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology often using Machine Learning (ML). John Lehmann enjoys sailing and photography in particular. Now wasn't that nice? In addition, I wrote a python script to automate the rank-testing of my page with various queries. You can see the standings as of today below. Variation based on case is more likely due to different query servers being hit rather than anything else, I'd guess. The purpose of this experiment is to see if my rank may increase with these other keywords as a result of the prose above. I won't actually be able to prove the causality, but if it shows that paragraph as the relevant snippet then that's pretty good evidence. I have already seen this happen with the 'dallas' keyword. Plus, Google seems to completely ignore my metatags so I get no help there.
RANKS QUERY
[76] -- 'john lehmann'
[78] -- 'John Lehmann'
[] -- 'john p. lehmann'
[] -- 'John P. Lehmann'
[] -- 'john lehmann richardson'
[1] -- 'john lehmann dallas'
[6] -- 'john lehmann texas'
[] -- 'john lehmann utd'
[] -- 'john lehmann university of texas at dallas'
[3] -- 'john lehmann lcc'
[] -- 'john lehmann nlp'
[] -- 'john lehmann language computer corporation'
As a sidenote, I wrote a script the other day which sends any of my homepage files to my ftp site which are older than the last update. This makes for really easy updates, and also explains the increase in my posting activity. :) I think I shall use this script, combined with a cron job to upload my new rankings each day (as if anyone really cares). I will put them in jplehmann.com_page_rank.txt. For completeness, know that I also added my site to dmoz.org and shamelessly begged my geek friends to add my page to their site as well. Another thing I noticed is that Google seems to have only indexed my two blog pages -- index.html, and index1.html. They are linked at the bottom of this page. The rest of my pages are linked through the menu at the top, but these are generated from JavaScript, to simulate SSI functionality. Therefore, I have added plain anchors at the bottom of this page to see if that makes a difference. Google crawled my site 2 times it seems in September, so we may be due for a visit soon. Sat 10/07/2006Olivia's Web PageCheck out this sweet web page I made for my cousin Olivia a few years ago. Now she's 15, and she probably doesn't think it's as cool anymore as it used to be. I also have a myspace page in case you didn't know. =)
 Sat 10/07/2006Web Page UpdatesNoticed that my stylesheets weren't working on pages other than the main index and fixed that. Also added some links to the "links" page and fixed some broken ones. Fri 10/06/2006Foot Slap on Youtube.comMy first youtube.com video. Unfortunately the color and sound are a bit off, but you get the idea. Description: "This is night 6 of our 19 day Europe backpacking trip (9/8/2005). I'm trying to do a few situps, but Michael won't leave me alone and is trying to slap me on the stomach. I'm going to give him a love tap...." Sun 9/24/2006We're live on the WWW!It's been a very busy year! I will write more about it someday. All I can say is that I have been working very hard on some personal projects of mine. I may not be successful in all the ways that I want to be, but I think it's something I will look back on and be glad that I tried. So if you have not seen or heard from me in a while, that is the reason. This will change significantly come Jan 07.
For now, I'm just updating my webpage by adding some additional keywords to it. This may help it to get indexed more accurately by search engines like Google. I'm excited to have discovered that this page is now in the top 100 hits with the keywords "John Lehmann", and #2 with "John Lehmann homepage". :) If you want to help me, put a link in your webpage to jplehmann.com.
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