Perlmonks.org is on the front page of the "perl tutorials" search on Google for me. I don't consider anything on the first page to be terribly low. The results ahead of PM's tutorial also appear to be Perl tutorials, and therefore also relevant.

Getting a little boost in search engine ranking wouldn't hurt. I would think, though, that a better goal than being seen as more relevant would be to actually be more relevant. As PM's already one of the most relevant Perl sites around, that could take some real effort to pull off.

I don't see a struggle in site optimization among members of the Perl community as that productive of an exercise in the end, either. It may help us to get awareness out about Perl if the sites were indexed well, but having the best Perl sites rise and fall organically on a search for Perl is probably the best way to handle such targeted searches for the community as a whole.

Here's some examples of searches that Perl sites might be expected to fall under:
searchresults pagetype
programming language 2 perl.com direct
easy programming language 1 perl.com as #7
simple programming language 1 perl.com at #8
bioinformatics 3 O'Reilly conference with "perl" in description
bioinformatics programming 1 A Perl bioinformatics course is #3.
artificial intelligence > 10 I only looked through ten, found nothing
rapid development > 10 same as above
report generation 9 Consulting firm mentions Perl in site description
automating system administration 1 IBM has an article on doing this with Perl at #3, while O'Reilly's Perl for System Administration is #9.
line noise 9 everything2.com talks about how despite some people find Perl's syntax opaque, it's the world's most flexible programming language
regular expression 1 Several. Some specifically Perl, some including Perl with other languages.
CGI 1 MSA is ahead of Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm, but both are on page 1.

And DBI is the first result overall for 'database interface'.

Over all, I think Perl is pretty well represented. Python, Java, Ruby, and PHP are often ahead of Perl in those results, but there might very well be more info on the web about those topics in those languages for all I know. I was a little surprised about bioinformatics, report generation, and rapid development being so bereft of Perl-related results.


Christopher E. Stith

In reply to Re^4: Google "related" search bias? by mr_mischief
in thread Google "related" search bias? by Anonymous Monk

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