Every now and then, ever since I’ve run a webpage or owned a domain, I go to search engines (Google in this case) and throw in my domain name to see how long it takes to get a link either directly to my site or a link to someone’s page that directly mentions my site. Normally its the third or fourth page, however, because of my writings I’ve done for City of Heroes my subdomain the Front Page shows up on the first page.
Out of curiosity, I decided to keep looking through the search results and see when I came up the second time. On page 4, one of my email addresses shows up in link to a post on the City of Heroes message boards, a place I do frequent. On page 8, a link shows up for a guy’s blog site, where he refers to the Front Page as “At first glance, this appears to be slightly odd City of Heroes fanfic. Look closer. It’s very odd, and it’s not quite City of Heroes or fanfic…”. I’m not sure how to take that, but I guess if someone is reading its better than no one reading at all. Around pages 12 and 13, a few links to posts on some programming boards come up, again because of my email address. Then we get a weird one: http://www.webknowhow.net/dir/Hosting/Free/ where they say to check out Probablynot.com to see examples Free Banners and Hosting, as well as “tab, music, whats cool, hot links, files” … hmmm, its not really a link to my site, but when you click it, you do go to my site. Page 25 gives us a link to an old EQ forum where someone references my old City of Mist raid guide as being good… of course, that link doesn’t work to get to my raid guide, and neither does the forum its posted on, but its in the Google cache. Some more links to email addresses show up, and then… we run out of results. The root site of Probablynot.com doesn’t show up on Google directly… *sigh*
But then… I remember seeing something odd, so I go back to Page 2 and see http://www.probablynot.net. It seems that there is a big problem with kids and gambling, and probablynot.net is a website devoted to helping recognize signs of gambling addiction in kids and ways to put them on the road to recovery. I’m a little scared of the site though, and not just because of the goofy pictures and colors, but that there is a sentance: “The most popular games of chance for youth are betting on games of skill, such as pool, card games and instant scratch-off lottery tickets.” See, either they have something grammatically incorrect with that sentance or scratch-off lotteries are based on skill and not blind stupid luck… and here I thought I never won because I was unlucky, but it turns out it might just be because I don’t have a good enough poker face to pull off the bluff, or perhaps I’m not using my penny properly to scratch off the card. (Note: I do not play scratch off lottery, my stupidity only goes as far as buying a $1 ticket every time the MegaMillions goes over $100 Million, because, well, shit, who couldn’t use $100 Million?)
I decided to check out probablynot.org, because someone does own that, but its just a holder page… no content. I also wanted to check out my old domains to see if anyone was doing anything with them… loadfix.com isn’t owned anymore… squadleader.com is, but like probablynot.org its a dead site with a holder page. Once, a long time ago, I wrote for a TeamFortress gaming site called lockandload.com… another dead site. Then there was my last gaming clan, nobodysheroes.org.. dead. ClanDoS.com… it belongs to a Battlefield: Vietnam clan called the Deadly 2 Dozen who have disbanded.
More curiosity began to creep in… There are way too many Jason Pace‘s in the world for me to sort through, besides I think I did it once before and I wasn’t there. But of Jason G. Pace‘s, there are three links, one to my resume and two to pages that link to my resume.
Well, largely an exercise in futility, but it interested me for a while, so I thought I would share.