Fame and Glory with Link and Citation Analysis

• 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).