I noticed a bit of weirdness in the Google index today, weirdness that I don’t really understand.

For a few years, if you searched Google for the phrase “incredible day,” (or Yahoo!, or MSN), I was the top hit, linked to the bit I wrote about going on a visiting nurse service call and getting to be a part of saving an infant’s life back during my pediatrics internship. This always amused me (if only because I’ve never considered myself the caliber of weblogger to merit a top-Google-hit on pretty much anything); from time to time, I’ve checked in to see if the search results have changed, and they’ve stayed pretty consistent. Sometime over the past few weeks, though, Google’s results did change — I’m still the top hit, but now Google oddly links the phrase to my page about copyright infringement complaints. I’m comfortable admitting that I don’t know a ton about how the search engine giant builds its indices, but from what I do know, I can’t figure out what caused this difference.

Alas, I can only fix that which I can control. So for the mean time, I’ve changed the script on my site that associates phrase-based URLs (like “copyrightInfringement”) with actual posts, and now it looks for page requests referred by Google searches for “incredible day” and does the right thing with them. At this point, I don’t have to do anything to handle the same searches over at Yahoo! or MSN — they’re still pointing to the right place.

Fun fun fun with web scripting…

Update: Between the time I posted this entry and now, Google’s index has now moved an Ariana Huffington post above mine on the page of “incredible day” results. Interesting!