Fame and Glory with Link and Citation Analysis
As of June 2002, I have noticed the following fun (if a bit silly) facts.
Most of these you can think of as easy-to-remember ways to find my web pages
without remembering URLs.
- I'm the top link in Google when you
type in just my last name. I'm also the top link if you search for 'princeton
karl'. I'm the second link for 'stanford karl' behind Karl Popper (can't
complain about that). I'm the top link for 'mysimon karl' despite that one of
the VPs of mySimon Inc. was named Karl while I was just a part-time employee.
- An article
I wrote for the Machine Learning conference with Ron Kohavi and George John
in 1994 is listed as the 7th
most cited article in Artificial Intelligence and the 8th most cited article in
Machine Learning according to CiteSeer (now called ResearchIndex).
These rankings are clearly biased towards articles dating from after people
started putting their papers on web pages as common practice (thus many
classic but older articles are not accurately represented), but this is still
pretty incredible for a paper written by three people who were at the time
all only graduate students.
- My web pages about safe, fun-to-drive automobiles are
the top link when you search Google for 'safest automobile', 'safest
automobiles', or 'safest fun car'. This is pretty impressive for
non-commercial web pages from someone who has no connection to the auto
industry whatsoever.
- My pages about split keyboards are
listed 1st at Google when you search for 'split keyboard', and 3rd when you
make it plural.
- My pages about vitamin and mineral
supplements are the top link in Google when you search for 'optimal
vitamin', 'optimal supplement', or 'vitamin supplement amounts'. Again,
somewhat amazing for non-commercial web pages from an ordinary consumer.
- Despite two more famous (on the net and in rec.climbing) rock climbers
named Karl, the 2nd link for 'rock climbing karl' on Google is a page (not
mine) of pictures from when I took some fellow summer interns at NASA
Ames climbing in Berkeley, CA. Kinda cool for a guy who will only ever at
best be a mediocre recreational climber. That's me heel-hooking in the 2nd
and 3rd pictures.
- On an unrelated recreational note, I'm also the top link for 'foosball
karl'.
:-)
As of June 2002, similar though not identical results can be had with other
major search engines. For example, the 'safest automobile' query produces one
of my pages listed first with Teoma, first with Overture, 2nd with Alta
Vista, 3rd with HotBot, and 3rd with Search.com (CNET).
Karl Pfleger
kpfleger@cs.stanford.edu