Gone from Google! My website was dropped from Google's search index sometime this past weekend for no apparent reason whatsoever! As of last week, this very site you are reading would be listed third or fourth in Google's listing when searching for my name.

Call me vain, but I regularly check to see how my website ranks in Google when searching for my name and this particular website usually came up pretty high in Google's ranking. As of last week, it was was listed either third or fourth on the list. But now, my website is nowhere to be found!

When I now search for my name on Google, aside from some other websites featuring people with the same name as mine, the other listings returned by the search engine are for sites that have no pertinence with the name "Eric Mah." Searching for the name of my website does return a search result, so my site hasn't been entirely dropped from Google's index.

I always use Google for my searches online. Whether at work or just for fun, Google is the first search engine I use to search the grand expanse of the Internet, so I was feeling a little miffed that my site suddenly went missing from the engine.

I wanted to see what kind of results I would get using other search engines. A quick check of our good friend Wikipedia gave me a list of some search engines. Below is a summary of a quick search of my name using some of these search engines.

 Source: Compiled from various search engines, March 2007

From my little experiment I learned that there are a lot of different types of search engines out there. Some are clunky and visually ugly, while others are slick and easy to use. Some focus on a specific area, some are Open Source projects, while others aggregate results from a number of different search engines. Many ranked my website fairly high, while others just didn't rank it at all. It seems that search engine aggregators, sites that combined the results of other search engines, provided the best results. After going through a bunch of sites, I like Dogpile.com the best.

This experience, taught me that you shouldn't rely on just one particular search engine for your Internet searching needs. The apparent all inclusiveness of Google can be a dangerous thing if people get complacent and rely 100% on it for their information gathering.

I think Google is a great service, it helps people sift through a lot of information in a quick and efficient manner. It's just that people also need to be sure that they have done their due diligence researching things on the Web. I'll now be double checking my searches with other search engines from now on. I just hope that my website can be reindexed by Google soon, though.