SusoSight SusoSight

Some are going to say I'm insensitive to the victims here. That's besides the point. I could do this with any term so the meaning and context are irrelevent.

Like many others, I was curious about the meaning of "Ismail Ax", which was written on the shooter's arm after the Virginia Tech shooting. I found it immediately intriguing that a search for "Ismail Ax" on April 17th at 2pm returned only 10 results, and 9 of them were all references to the shooter himself while the 10th one seemed prior to April 16th to be the only reference to this phase on the Internet. What do you call that? A Google hole in one or something. Ah, its called a GoogleWhack. There is a game for it. Anyways.

I immediately though at that point that it would be interesting to track how large the search results pages on Google get and how fast. Not exactly sure how useful this data would be, but it could be used to determine how many blogs with current information are out there. Given that this incident has made very big news and the mystery of the words involved, it is likely to be talked about a lot.

Since my xulu site is not really public yet and also I've blocked bots from going through this wiki, I can be more assured that posting this here won't skew my results. I'll open the site up later when the results become more interesting.

So here, without further ado, are my tracking of statistics. All times are in EST.

• April 15th
  • Google would have returned 1 result
  • MSN looks like it would have returned 3 results in 2 different sites.
  • A9 returned the same results as MSN.
  • Dogpile returned 6 results, but 3 of them where for the seperate words.
  • Most of the other search engines I checked from Wikipedia's list of engines returned nothing.
• April 17th - 2:11pm (this might have been this way since the 16th)
  • Google web search returned 10 results (out of 10)
• April 17th - 3:04pm
  • web search returned 12 results (out of 37 estimated from the first page)

• April 17th - 4:50pm
  • Web search returned 2 results (out of 2). This was from my home machine. I made sure that safe search was off, etc. Not sure if google did something or what.

• April 17th - 5:02pm
  • Damn google tries to be so smart, I wasn't seeing that it categorizes blog posts. Now I have to track that seperately.
  • Web search returned 2 results (out of 2).
  • Blog results returned 119 (out of 155 estimated on the front page, 131 estimated on the last page)

• April 17th - 6:11pm
  • Web search: 10 (estimated: 10)
  • Blog search: 139 (estimated: 161 on first page, 154 on second)

• April 17th - 8:41pm
  • Web search: 12 (estimated: 341!!!)
  • Blog search: 179 (estimated: 218 on first page, 203 on second)

• April 17th - 9:14pm
  • At this point, I automated the process so it would run from cron every hour on the 30th minute. All the pages are being written to the server with GMT time stamps here