To stay alive on google

Who wouldn't want to be listed on google's directory?? Although this is something that I have read about in numerous "increasing your google rank" websites, but i was surprised to discover that your rank depends significantly on how often you update your content. However, I still believe that the top criterion is still the number of links you have linking to your page.

I have noticed that my blog has been loosing rank, in the past fews days since I have stopped publishing content. But again, a page that publishes frequently battling for rank against a page that has a 100 links to itself on the www, the one with the links wins (my theory). Some people have managed to hack google, and I noticed this when i was searching for something which i dont remember really (try searching for a famous celebrity's pics). You get search results with links to their pages, regardless of whether they have the content you are searching for or not - i.e. they have fooled the google crawler somehow.

Queen mary's information retrieval group does a lot of work in "search" research. The little knowledge I have on information retrieval comes from the chit-chat sessions I used to have with my fellow MSc classmates who took up the information retrieval course.

Meanwhile, on the news: Sony is planning to cut 10K jobs by 2008. My theory is that people still "love" Sony, but they just cant afford it anymore. This is on top of the fact that Sony's lost popularity in the mp3 player business (to Apple iPod) and in the LCD TV market.