Mar
20th
2015
Let me do my thing... · 9:37pm Mar 20th, 2015
Okay, so earlier today, I tried Googling one of my favorite songs by The Crystal Method, which is how I learned that my fanfiction is the first result you get when you search for "Wild, Sweet & Cool." Non-brony fans of TCM (who are likely the majority) must find this rather confusing.
Anyway, WSC turned 3 this year, though I'm a little late for the anniversary. In any case, here's the song it's named after:
I'm pretty sure google search results are personalized. Meaning that based on your browsing and searching history, the engine knows which of the hundreds of thousands results you are more likely to be interested in. While I, too, have your story as a second top result (the first being a huge youtube view of the song you were after), I'm fairly certain that for someone who never visited fimfiction (or other fanfic related sites), it would come up somewhat lower in the ranking.
The magickz of the modern search engines.
2894925
I wish Google didn't do this. Lame.
I tried searching in incognito mode in an attempt to work around that:
i.imgur.com/63bs9G4.png
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).
A short experiment later let's me believe it isn't quite enough (especially if you're using Chrome, in which case incognito probably means incognito for anyone but Google
Anyway, here are the results of searching in incognito mode while logged in my Google account:
i.imgur.com/pAUM8uq.png
And here are the results after I have logged out of my Google account OR cleared the browser history OR used another browser (which I very seldom use at all, so it's history could be considered clean):
i.imgur.com/3ZqyeSl.png
Do you really?
And how often do you use other search engines, if I might ask? 
OF course, we all pay for that - with gigabytes of data about ourselves, left each time we browse the web on our PCs, android phones, tablets and the likes.
There's a trade of sorts here. For the vast majority of users, Google delivers the most accurate search results exactly because of this personalization and their complicated selection algorithms. If they turned them off for a day or so, the users could be left wondering, why their search engine, usually so precise and thorough, suddenly started behaving as some of the competition's products.
Kinda scary, once you realize such information could be misused...
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Bah, I thought about opening another browser but figured if I wasn't logged in while in incognito that might be enough.
And yeah, I really do wish they wouldn't. I liked being able to say "Google X and click on the third link" to people, and know they'd get to what I was talking about.
2894925 - Well, thank goodness. As much as I like my story, I think the song is a bit better. Now, if only the first video link wasn't to a remix...
(Seriously, I had to do some digging on YouTube to find something with the original version of the song.)
Wild, Sweet & Cool is the fic that got me to try reading fanfics out. Then I started writing them.
You'll always have a spot in my recommended fics list for that.