The web now has many trillions of pages on it. Some of it utter garbage, some of it amazingly useful. The addition of zillions of blogs to the zilliions of web sties has compounded this, and is growing at rates no one ever thought possible. Besides commercial sites and more, people blog about the nonsensical to the profound. Even oral cancer opinion blogs and patient's chronicalling their journey are part of it all. So how do you make sense of these trillions of pages of information? How do you find something that comes close to what you are looking for? Search engines like Google (who by the way has been a fantastic partner of OCF's by giving us the search engine that runs our site search function) make it possible. But cataloging all this stuff is a task that boggles the mind. So the first thing to do is send out ittle self directing programs (spiders), robots (bots), to see what's out there and add it to some kind of structured list/catalog which of course is out of date every second of every day, with the rate of new additions to the www. So these spiders wander from link to link, page to page, cataloging every word and image they come across. What they bring back is sorted by a proprietary algorithm (no one knows how Google decides if something is valuable or not, but they have a means that makes sense to them) and when you type in oral cancer in a search engine -cancer stuff comes up.
Your ranking as a site, blog, or whatever in the Goggle system cannot be bought, not for love nor money. People have speculated on what this criteria for ranking is, since they would like to manipulate it for higher ranking in the list, but only Goggle knows for sure. Anyway, OCF has been in the top three finds for oral cancer since our first year out here, and we have spent more than 80% of our 7.5 years out here in the number one spot. When we get beaten out it is by the NIH or someone that has hundreds of thousands of pages of quality information. Tonight's search in Google for "oral cancer' finds OCF in the number two position, behind only Medline, the world's largest database of medical articles. Not a bad showing considering that there are 5,690,000 finds right now for oral cancer.... and yes, that is the correct number of zeros.
Anyway, all this is made possible by spiders that crawl aimlessly around the web cataloging what they find. They are crawling on our messages now besides our web site. What that means is that information in our threads will be found by people in need and hopefully help them or bring them to us.
