A while back whilst trawling through my referrer logs, I noticed a hit from MSN search with the string "free downloads of ms-dos"; I checked it out, and I was number 8 in the rankings for that phrase - the words "free", "downloads" and "MS-DOS" appeared somewhere on various pages, but it was purely coincidental.

Anyway, being the charitable fellow I am (and having recently stumbled across an old version of MS-DOS on the MSFT website whilst looking for QBASIC (don't ask)) I figured what the heck, and added a link with that exact phrase, pointing at the relevant MSFT page. A week later, and searching for "free downloads of ms-dos" yields, well, not me.

So, what gives? How come when I just happened to have the search terms at random points across my site I scored highly, but now I have the exact phrase I'm not there any more? I don't care about this specific instance, but it seems to be a common thing these days...

People regularly find my book website using searches like "thatched cottages" and "paned glass", so beats me.

msn search is weird. if you search for my name, you used to get my previous employer's web site as the first hit. why? i'm not sure. my name is nowhere on that site. i do have a series of newsgroups posts which point to a different subdomain of that company, and come from an email address at net another subdomain, but nothing i know of points to the main site.

what's stranger is that msn no longer does this, but yahoo now does! both are better than google, since they both find my real site somewhere on the first page.