Results from Googling Myself

My friend Sally Howard emailed me today and noted that at the Old Farmer's Almanac website the Question of the Day for 1/20/2007 was this: "What information do you have on Thomas Stone, signer of the Declaration of Independence?" Few have heard of that Thomas Stone, but I learned of him several years ago when I first "Googled" myself by searching for "Thomas Stone" at Google.com. Since many, I wondered of my long-time work on the web was enough to get some of webpages that mention my name near the top of the Google results for such a search. I found that this 18th century Thomas Stone was far higher ranked at Google than I was. I think many years ago the highest anything about me could be found was perhaps on the fifth or tenth page of Google results.

Well, things have changed apparently. Without any effort on my part to raise my "google ranking", I was pleased to discover today that the About Me page at my EpistemeLinks website now is the sixth ranking result at Google for a search on "Thomas Stone". The 18th century fellow still dominates the top results, but now I'm pretty high up there too. I guess that doesn't surprise me too much, since the EpistemeLinks site gets a lot of usage and is very well linked around the Internet (well, at least at philosophy-related sites like college philosophy department sites and so on).

A bit more surprising was that the 12th highest Google result was for my relatively newer -- and far less viewed -- "Philosopher Stone" blog site. I only started the blog last year, so I was glad to see it already at the top of page 2 for Google "Thomas Stone" results. If it is similarly ranked at other major search engines, this might explain the apparent uptick in readership from people who I don't know. Like many blogs, mine started with mostly readers who know me already. But lately I've been getting some emails from people I don't know, with positive and critical comments about my writing there.