Thursday, March 20, 2008

Googling "Seattle Homeless"

I found out why the four-month-old Typical Seattle Homeless Encampment Scene is still, with 250 hits since late January, my single most visited page. The majority of readers here don't go to a specific link. They just land on Apesma's Lament and scroll down through the posts. But some do, and the Top Ten Posts list at right ranks the busiest pages. I only pay for StatCounter to log the last 10,000 visits, so after a few months, most posts sort of drop off into oblivion. But this one from December 9 has weirdly stayed right up top. The mystery is now solved.

When you Google "Seattle Homeless" it's number three, and looks like this:

Apesma's Lament: Typical Seattle Homeless Encampment Scene
The image at right, if you've been reading local press accounts o
f Seattle homeless encampments, is the sort of scene that takes place hundreds of times a ...
apesmaslament.blogspot.com/2007/12/typical-seattle-homeless-encampment.html - 265k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

I think that's pretty cool.

The next post down is something on the WRAP blog, which turns out to be SKCCH ED Alison Eisinger giving a kick-ass speech at our first sweeps protest on December 19.

And the fifth hit was this remarkable thread from City-Data.com, where an overly contrived question about homelessness in Seattle — Should it keep this brave New Yorker away? — blossoms into a frank and often touching exchange of perspectives.

Number one was a Mariners fundraiser on the Good News In Sports blog, about good people who play in sports, doing good things, and number two was some weird thing that I'll have to figure out later.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I Google "Seattle Homeless" I get the following results:

Number One - City of Seattle efforts to support people experiencing homelessness.

Number Three - Real Change (Cool!!!) Keep up the great work!

Number Four - United Way report on homelessness (Pretty cool, too!)

Number Five - Some weird fucking link about the dangers of "beggars, panhandlers,homeless."
http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/North_America/United_States_of_America/Washington_State/Seattle-894670/Warnings_or_Dangers-Seattle-Beggars_Panhandlers_Homeless-BR-1.html

Tim Harris said...

I get something closer to yours now too. The Seattle.gov you got, SKCCH, Real Change, the relatively ugly discussion about homelessness going on over at Virtualtourist, and an Urban Rest Stop piece by the PI. I guess it's inconsistent. It did strike me as odd that most of the top five were blogs.

"Uta" Urban said...

3/21/08 11:04 am
google "seattle homeless" item #5 New News:

Seattle Times 03/20/08
UW Anthropologist Studies Homeless

I wonder if she got to attend Mayor Nickel's sweeps. Police and social workers provided info last summer. United Way is going to use it, the article says.

Dr. Wes Browning said...

If you all have Blogger accounts you're probably getting personalized search results when you use Google. Try logging out of Google and Blogger and gmail and deleting all your cookies, ha, ha, and see what you get.