Dear Maury, My Google Page Rank Is Too High

As in Maury Povich of the Maury Show. 

In “The Cost of Page Rank“, Doug Bowman writes about the unique prob­lem pre­sent­ed to blogs when Google gives too high a page rank.

Matt [Haughey] has a the­o­ry why so many peo­ple blind­ly believe they’ve found the right place to leave com­ments, or get in touch with some per­son or enti­ty. And I agree with him. In fact, I’d take his the­o­ry a step fur­ther. To many peo­ple, the Google search box is syn­ony­mous with the browser’s loca­tion field. It’s the same thing to them. With the Google Toolbar installed in IE, (or because it pre-exists in oth­er browsers) the search field is almost indis­tin­guish­able from the browser’s loca­tion field. “I type some­thing into that field, and Google takes me where I want to go.” 


To prove his point, Doug ref­er­ences (with­out direct­ly ref­er­enc­ing) a cou­ple of posts on his own blog, “Starting Over“ being one, that share the name of a pop­u­lar tele­vi­sion show. That com­mon­al­i­ty is giv­ing Doug’s post a top rank­ing in Google. When fans of the “Starting Over“ show search Google, they find Doug’s post (cur­rent­ly ranked num­ber two below the show’s offi­cial site) and believe it to be the site for the actu­al show. Consequently they com­ment their dis/approval of the show’s con­tent or attempt to con­tact the show’s producers.

On my per­son­al blog I’ve encoun­tered the same phe­nom­e­non with unex­pect­ed­ly high page rank­ings. Doing a google search for “teen titans game“ yields results sim­i­lar to Doug’s: Cartoon Network’s page for the Teen Titans Flash game as result num­ber one, and, as num­ber two and three, my blog post from eleven months ago (enti­tled “Nifty Teen Titans Game“) where­in I sim­ply wrote:

Teen Titans – BattleBlitz
Pretty cool Flash-based fight­ing game.
I can’t wait for this show to actu­al­ly start. It looks like it might be a lot of fun. 

Because of the Google rank­ing, my twenty-eight word June 2003 post has become the hot spot for request­ing tech sup­port and hacks for the game.

Another one of my posts is in the top ten for “ undeletable file“, which is actu­al­ly a good thing since oth­er peo­ple are ben­e­fit­ting from the solu­tion I found to a com­mon Windows tech­ni­cal prob­lem. John Gruber had vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal results with his post about a tech­ni­cal solu­tion for an OS X prob­lem ener­gy saver not loading.

While my “undeletable file” and John’s “ener­gy saver won’t load” being ranked high are a good thing for peo­ple deal­ing with those tech­ni­cal prob­lems, Google rank­ings can become mis­lead­ing to the gen­er­al pub­lic and annoy­ing to blog­gers. (I couldn’t care less about the junk being post­ed to my “Nifty Teen Titans Game” post.)

On 28 July, 2002 Ryan MacMichael post­ed to his blog an innocu­ous lit­tle anec­dote about his vis­it to New York and see­ing the “Maury Show” as a mem­ber of the stu­dio audi­ence. Today, 28 May, 2004, twenty-two months lat­er, peo­ple are still com­ment­ing, beg­ging for Maury’s help.

I just need Maury’s email… I need for him to help me on a search of my nev­er known father.
Im from Puerto Rico…. Maybe is to late he should be dead by now but still I must have fam­i­ly on his side. Just need to dis­cov­er this part of my life. My moth­er died and nev­er want­ed me to talk about it. he hat­ed him ….I nev­er want­ed to make her mad so nev­er talked about it.

Now Im 50. I was born in NY,

the rest is history 

Wrote one des­per­ate man. A young girl with stars in her eyes writes:

I need Maury’s email address because I need to con­tact him. My dreams of being a young movie/tv actress are no where near to com­ming true and I have no sup­port from any­one and this all is just tair­ing me up inside. I’m almost 15 and my dreams are no where near com­ming true. 

Then there are the real tear jerkers:

I NEED MAURY”S EMAIL ADDRESS BECAUSE I WANT TO HELP OTHER TEENS WHO ARE BEING ABUSED. IM 15 YEARS OLD AND I LIVE IN CHICAGO. I WAS LIVING IN OHIO WITH MY BIOLOGICAL FATHER FOR TWO YEARS. 2 OR 3 MONTHS AFTER I WAS THERE HE STARTED TOUCHING ME INWAYS I DIDNT LIKE.HE MADE ME GIVE HIM ORAL SEX AND HE TRIED TO HAVE SEX WITH ME. WHEN MY MOM TOLD THE POLICE THEY SAID HIS ACTIONS WHERE CONSIDERED RAPE. I NOW HAVE TO SEE A THERAPIST EVERY THURSDAY AND I HAVE TO SEE A DOCTOR EVERY 6 MONTHS TO MAKE SURE IM ALRIGHT. I WANT TO BE ON THE MAURY SO I CAN TRY TO HELP OTHER TEENS LIKE ME TELL IF THEY ARE BEING ABUSED OR IF THEY WERE RAPED. MY DAD IS IN JAIL NOW WHERE HE CANT GET TO ME. I ALSO WROTE SOME POEMS AND I WANT HELP PUBLISHING THEM SO THEY CAN ENCOURAGE TEENS EVERY WHERE TO NOT BE AFFRAID. SO PLEASE HELP ME. 

And…

I need Maury’s address. My name is Andrea and I’m 16 years old. My 11 year old sister’s best friend Jeanette, her moth­er is dying from Pancreatic can­cer. Jeanette’s mom is all she has, and the chemo and radi­a­tion are not work­ing. She’s in the last cou­ple of months, the dotors don’t think she has much longer. I’ve come to adore Jeanette. She’s a won­der­ful and strong­willed child. I only wish, Maury, that in these next cou­ple of months, maybe they could do some­thing won­der­ful togeth­er (her and her mom). I don’t have the mon­ey to, bt maybe you could help. Anything would be a mir­a­cle. Just some­thing spe­cial. Both of them are going to be miss­ing out­on so much so soon. Please help. If you reply, I will send my phone num­ber and address. Please help. 

The com­ments go on like that, peo­ple ask­ing for aid of one type or anoth­er to them­selves or a loved one. A cou­ple praise Maury for his tele­vised assis­tance to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Others, like the young rape vic­tim above, ask Maury to help them help those less for­tu­nate. I lost count of the let­ters to Maury after fifty.

This morn­ing Ryan shut off the com­ment­ing fea­ture say­ing: “Well, since this has fall­en into a state of bor­ing and stu­pid respons­es (many of which I delet­ed for their sheer lack of humor) time to shut off com­ments for this baby.”

Google’s page rank­ing algo­ry­thm has lead to con­fu­sion and the mis­di­rec­tion to blogs of those peo­ple seek­ing one thing or anoth­er, like “Starting Over”, Teen Titans game sup­port, and the “Maury Show”. Upon mis­di­rec­tion, many fig­ure out that the result­ing site isn’t the one they sought. Quite a few, as evi­denced by the com­ments, don’t ascer­tain the distinction.

I agree with Matt’s hypoth­e­sis that many, many peo­ple online don’t get the con­cept of blogs and blog posts about a TV show. As he states in this post ref­er­enc­ing yet anoth­er case of a blog post about a tele­vi­sion show being con­fused for the offi­cial site of that show: ”my guess is that reg­u­lar folks see Google as an inter­net appli­ance, and when you put in ‘over­haulin’ you will get the right site as the first result and if that site asks for com­ments, it must be the show, right?”

The les­son here is that, for now, blog­gers should be care­ful about the titles of their posts less they get too high a Google page rank­ing. I say “for now” because, before too long, the porn sites will fig­ure out this lit­tle trick and stuff their pages with ref­er­ences to “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” Mark Cuban‘s “The Benefactor,” and, of course, the “Maury Show,” thus knock­ing us hap­p­less blog­gers so far down Google’s rank­ing that mis­di­rect­ed Dear Maury mail will no longer be an issue.

P.S. Reading the com­ments to Maury Povich on Ryan MacMichael‘s blog real­ly tugged at my heart. Granted, a few of them are prob­a­bly bull­shit attempts to get on television—Springer has proven there are enough morons will­ing to do any­thing to get their mugs broad­cast to laun­dro­mats and trail­er parks every­where. One prime exam­ple of such a moron is Jerry Springer him­self. But, the major­i­ty of those pleas on for help on Ryan’s site rung sin­cere to me.

What about those peo­ple? What about Bethany who asked for some help for her moth­er, a woman who gives her two daugh­ters every­thing she can, while shop­ping exclu­sive­ly at Goodwill for her­self? And what about Betty, the grand­moth­er beg­ging Maury to help her reunite with her long lost grand­daugh­ter? There’s also Heather, a woman who can’t afford to have her leak­ing breast implant removed despite mount­ing health prob­lems relat­ed there­to. What about them?

Was the extent of Ryan MacMichael’s response to sim­ply ridicule them? Are they sit­ting at home (or a shel­ter, as the case may be) in the mis­tak­en belief that they’ve sent their pleas for help to Maury? Are they wait­ing by the phone or friend’s com­put­er for an answer? All of these peo­ple left e‑mail addresses—some even post­ed snail mail address­es. Did Ryan give them the cor­rect con­tact infor­ma­tion for the “Maury Show”?

If he has a heart, I sin­cere­ly hope he did.

2 thoughts on “Dear Maury, My Google Page Rank Is Too High

  1. orrel

    hi my name is orrel mau­ry i need help on find­ing her but this is what i know here name is bet­ty l. buf­fin and i kove 

  2. amanda flannery

    hey mau­ry i have a trou­bled 7 year old i dun­no if this is how to do it or not but he is get­tin out of hand iam from alber­ta cana­da and i dun­no what lengths to take any­more he had a knife today and cut up our tram­po­line and then threat­ened the boy who lived next door with i need help i have tried to find boot camps or tough love pro­grams out here but have had no sucess please mau­ry can you help me and my 7 year old he is adhd and odd as well and is on med­ica­tion and does not seem to work we are lookin for help in any­way please e mail me back thanks
    aman­da flannery

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