Ariel’s Blog

Since my name is way toooooo simple when spelled in English, you used to get tons of results if you just search my name in google. Before I graduated from Austin, my name showed pretty high because of certain popularity of my papers. After graduation, I moved my website to the new school and my web page starts to disappear from Google. One year later, I couldn’t find myself. This is so frustrating!!

How can I get back to the List? I started discussing with my friends about how Google ranks the entries. There were some saying about Google ranks based on your “popularity”. That is, you will get top if you are searched by many or many have added your webpage in their hotlink. … It sounds no easy task though. Another friend suggested me to change to a not-so-simple name. See if your name has a complicated spelling, you won’t get a lot of “competitors”. LOL. But I LOVED MY NAME!!!

Finally, I turned to our computer support group in the university (they are fabulous by the way). A quick and easy solution comes up: our school has reference program with google so they can simply let them know my webpage and add me to the List. A little back door which you have to ask for. Great, now if you just type in my name in Google search box, you find my webpage as the first result. So if you want to the same thing, go check with your technology support group.

Summer vacation is over and it’s time to resume my blog. Last week, I read an interesting article from WSJ talking about a new way of speaking — the 133t534k (leetspeak). (See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118679550023894850.html) Which is even funnier, our Chinese Internet chatters has created even fancier set of language which combines shortcuts of English words and Chinese words to fast-typing, such as the word “3x” as “thanks”, because the number 3 in chinese sounds similar to “than”. This gives us a superior feeling of knowing English as the younger generation of Chinese (Most of our parents generation don’t know much of English.) In addition, we see this as a channel to show off our creativity — who can develope interesting expressions your friend need to think a while to get it.

To test whether you belong to the Elite generation, try to figure out the following sentece:

“TEh INTeRn3T i5 THr3@+EN1N9 t0 Ch@n93 thE W4Y wE $p34k.” (See the WSJ article for the answer)