I decided to google the Miami Herald's Sunday online and printed headline "The Hijacking Suspect Next Door" in light of Tuesday's discussion regarding Search Engine Optimization-just to see if any of its key words would help locate the article within the vast world wide web-and oddly enough, the exact article popped up as the first search result.
I say oddly because, as pointed out in class, I didn't feel as though any of the headline's words helped narrow down what the article was truly about. They were way too vague. The copy editor could have used key words in the headline like Cuba or Miami (geographic location), since the hijackers were Cuban sympathizers who hijacked a flight from Miami; maybe the name of one of the hijackers, whom were profiled in the story, could have been used as well. Just a suggestion...
Upon further review of the articles generated by Google search, I noticed that though the first few results retrieved the Miami Herald story, the rest of the results ranged from Turkish terrorists to even a Chinese jet that was hijacked on its way to Japan. Basically, the majority of the articles appearing after the first few results were completely unrelated to my original headline search.
I believe the reason why this Miami Herald headline appeared at the top of the Google search page is because the article is still fresh. But if we give it some time to travel through the black hole of the world wide web, eventually being replaced with other stories with similar headlines, we may never find it again-without of course using more "key words" in our search.
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Keep in mind you got exactly what you typed in. But how many readers would type in an actual headline? The search engine will return exactly what you're looking for. So if you had heard about that story (on TV or radio, for instance, or someone was talking about it in class,) what would you type in? Try searching on that...
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