Internet Hide and Seek

In the movie "Field Of Dreams" a voice whispers from the fields that says, "If you build it, they will come." And that was my belief a long time ago when I first created a web site. I thought that if I made a web site that was full of good information, people who were interested in stained glass would find it and we would build a community of stained glass enthusiasts.

But unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. The search engines, Google, Yahoo and Ask are the resources that Internet users have to find web sites and information. You would think that it would be easy for these engines to find your website and realize that it is so good, lots of people will want to see it.

But then competition enters the picture. See, everybody else thinks their website is the best. So the engines have to figure out ways to rank the websites they find and figure which ones people find useful. They do a pretty good job. It becomes a kind of popularity contest.

The popular become popular and the obscure stay obscure. So we hired an SEO (search engine optimization) company and they took money from us for a year. Our popularity is the same as it was before.

But the other day I realized that I must be doing something right. Even though very few people seem to be visiting our web sites (27,380 and 23,321 and 4,168) I am starting to get a lot more junk e-mail. This means that someone found my e-mail address and put in on a junk list. So, someone's finding us!