As the Green Left Weekly website continues to be the number 1 political website in Australia, we're discovering its prominence on the search engine Google.
A friend of one of our Canberra GLW distributors wanted to catch up with the latest gossip from Survivor by checking out Who Weekly magazine on the web. So they did a Google search for "who weekly australia", and was surprised to find GLW first and second on the resulting list.
So we tried a few other combinations: "left australia" came up number one and two, with "weekly green" GLW was at number five, for "left", we were at number eight.
Of course, searching for green left weekly (or any combination of the three words) gets about 98 of the first 100, either our site, links to us by friendly sites, translations, and the occasional right wing attack. Google returns a total of 1.6 million results, many of which would be relevant to us. "Green Left Weekly" in quotes returns 45,500 pages, while 55,700 pages contain greenleft.org.au.
Entering "Green Left Weekly" Hitwise returns the sites that carried the report by web-ranking company Hitwise about the GLW website's popularity. We were ranked the second most popular political web site for Australians after Michael Moore's site. Wondering what link there might be between Michael Moore and Australia, we entered "michael moore australia" and sure enough, the first three sites listed are for GLW.
On a hunch, and looking forward to the elections, we tried "throw howard out" and up popped GLW for the first three pages! Wondering how good Google really was we tried "end the lies", and again, the first two sites were GLW. We tried "troops out now!", and yet again, GLW had the top two listings. Smart searching!
From Green Left Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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