Wednesday, December 5, 2007

What if God ran Google…

The other day I was messing around in Google analytics marveling at the statistics it provides. It shows me where people who visit this site come from, how they found it, how long they stayed etc. I wish it told me your names so I could thank you for reading this work, but it does not.

What I have learned is that most people who visit do so organically. A googleized term meaning you typed in a search word and clicked onto the site. No big deal right? It is actually. 80% of the people who find the site do so through organic google searches.

You see I did not set out to build a popular site, frankly I am happier to be in obscurity since I am being uncomfortably transparent here. So if you don’t tell your friends about the site, fine, really! I set out to honor God. I set out to document my own faith journey and in doing so hoped that it might touch some person who might find God themselves in part from reading my story. That is it the only goal.

Funny thing happened in Google analytics when I realized the significance of an 80% organic score with a healthy growing reader base. I was hitting near the top of search phrases in google! That is the only way people who do not know me were finding the site.

I am humbled to discover that for certain search phrases I was coming up on the second and even first page of google results. This stunned me. Imagine being in the top twenty results of hundreds of thousands of hits even in tens of millions. For those of you who may not know it is commonly believed that if you do not show up on the first three pages of google people will not find you since they either refine their search or stop looking further. So here I am on page one and two. What keywords were amplifying my search results?

how do I know if I am saved

This question when entered into google spits one of my blog posts out at # 17 of 12,900,000 results!

When I saw this and realized the post actually was not even intended to answer this question directly I was shaken. You see google has a complicated algorithm it uses to rank the importance of web articles and returns them accordingly. It returned my post in the top 0.000013% of all results.

I do not believe this is accidental, a coincidence, even a fancy algorithm, I believe this is God at work using this post to reach out to those curious about what it means to be saved.

So then I started to get creative…

What if God ran Google

  • It would not be spiders crawling web sites it would be saints

  • It would no longer be pay per click, but kneel per click

  • Safe search really would be

  • Search result 12,900,000 would of course be shown first and mine would be ranked 12,899,983’rd

  • Never again would you skip past a seemingly unrelated result but stop and wonder “What is he trying to tell me here???”

  • Somehow the words Prayer, Worship, Faith Hope and Love would mysteriously appear in every search. Love would of course be first and in bold font.

  • No matter how hard they try to remove his name, God would appear in the text of every search

  • You could conduct the same keyword search day after day and get completely different and richer meaning from the results

  • The poor of spirit would always get the quickest response times and best search results

  • Somehow the rich guy, he just couldn’t get the search button to actually work and return any results

  • All the old school web experts would be offended and refuse to consider what their search results meant

  • And when the final search was hit it would return a simple message that every knee should bow and every tongue confess the name of Jesus.

Do you have any others? I would love to hear them. Post a comment.

Father I thank you for all you do to draw us near


I praise you for the creative spirit you have blessed us with


I praise you for keen intellects


Father I pray that you continue to shower us with your blessings

That we continue to seek you in all our actions in all our heart


I thank you for our salvation and hope in your son

Our savior

Jesus Christ

Amen

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