Daily Brad, the blog

In the blogs that I read, email newsletters I subscribe to, and info that comes across my desk, the new search engine Cuil (pronounced like “cool”) seems to have been mentioned quite a few times times. So in typical fashion, I did a vanity search for my own name (and my company’s primary product name for that matter) to see what results it would come up with compared to other searches in Google or Yahoo.

What I found, is Cuil seems to have liked my LinkedIn page best. So I did a search for my friend, and illustrator Jonathan Hull (who continually competes for search engine attention from an author with the same name.) The author guy (that “other” Jonathan Hull) seemed to control the first three pages, and then… well then… nothing else (Nope, no more results at all). So the first thing I found is the fact that Jonathan Hull’s website is named www.jonathan-hull.com or my website is www.bradmccall.com seemed to have no effect on its relevancy for the same terms searched for in Cuil. In fact, even 10 pages into Cuil’s results and I didn’t find bradmccall.com listed as any part of its results when searching for “Brad McCall”.

So I followed up with my typical rounds of search to see what showed up by typing Brad McCall Utah and while links showed up from other sites that directed to mine, the direct link didn’t show up until page 5. Seems odd, right?

So I tried another brand company. Glaceau (They make the Vitamin Water that I’ve been drinking of late – so it was a quick grab.) and voila! Their brand name appears first thing. (glaceau.com) Okay, so they got that right. So I tried “Dell”, and the search engine errored out. A search engine erroring out? More oddness. (I tried this again later and whatever didn’t work was fixed)

So at last, I tried Omniture, the company that has garnered my full-time employ, and a random bunch of links came up, many of which were a part of the Omniture website, but its corporate website was nowhere to be found in the results. If you ARE patient enough to wait, you will notice on an “Omniture” search will create a menu that has some awesome links to the corporate site as well as product links – pages that ARE MISSING from the search results.

Does anyone get how this works? What gives? And is this REALLY supposed to compete with Google?

I meant to mention this the other day when I Googled myself and found I had lost the top spot on Google’s search engine to a blog. (I question Google’s mixed relationship there, because it owns the blogging tool.), but today when I checked, I’ve even moved further down the line to be 5th. I’m talking about when you do a quote-less search for brad mccall. I’m number 4 when you add back in the quotes.

Yahoo’s still got me on top, so I’m good there, and so does MSN.

Perhaps it’s because of my lack of frequency of added material to the Daily Brad? Or my lack of mentioning my name - Brad McCall in my posts with relevant content? I’m number 2 when searching for “Daily Bread”, just beneath a site that I think has been using that phrase a lot longer than me, so that can’t be it. I’m still highly suspicious about Google’s blogs appearing on top, and then not in any of the other search engines. Conspiracy theories aside, I think Google may have it’s hands in too many pots to be unbiased any of them.

Remember when you did your first professional freelance job? You did everything from beginning to end including the design, printing and management? I was thinking about that mixture of excitement and nervousness as I sent it off to press followed by the sure satisfaction that followed when the client loved the way it looked.

Now I look back at my work in 1996 and say - wow, I could have done so much better. But it’s 12 years later and there’s been a heck of a lot of design I’ve cranked out between now and then.

My first true freelance project was for one of my friends from High School, well actually for one her family’s businesses. Her name was Amy Kelly, the job was a postcard for tourist hotel card slots, and the business was Red Garter Ice Cream Saloon in Vale, Oregon. After inheriting land and moving to Vale, OR, Amy’s parents had started several small businesses to cater to the tourists coming through town following on the Oregon Trail. This was one of them and they needed to get their name out there.

Here’s the results (these are two up).

I haven’t had that same feeling about a project for a while and I I don’t know if it’s the medium I work in (100% Internet), or the fact that I work as an in-house designer for the client (Omniture), or that the projects I work on are mostly team-plays with shared responsibilities and rewards.

Do you remember your first “professional” freelance experience?

For those of you who don’t know what Bloglines is, you might as well go and check out the link. But in short, it allows you a one stop place to monitor all your RSS feeds. There are a quite a few tools that do this (even your portals like Yahoo and Google), but this one was the first one I was introduced to, and you know how that goes. (They won me!) Which one do you use?

(more…)