March 9, 2007

Curious about Freebase? Don't ask Google, just ask a crack dealer!

Search Engines

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

There's been a ton of buzz about Freebase lately: a newly launched collaborative database of cross-linked data. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and get all crazy excited about it, because to me it looks like another geek-centric technology that is exciting to the techies but useless to 99.9% of the population (Yahoo pipes, anyone?). What I will say is this: the name they chose combined with Google being a bit delayed in spidering their site yields some interesting search results.

I could be alone here, but when I hear "freebase" one thing comes to mind: smoking crack. I don't smoke crack, or anything else for that matter, but being a veteran urbanite I can't help but associate that term with the people who hit the ol' glass pipe on the corner of 2nd and bell at 2am.

The Freebase.com domain looks like it hasn't had much attention until this week (currently a Page Strength 2), so Google probably isn't too quick to bump it up in the serps for the term "freebase."

The moral here: choosing a name with funny connotations may have interesting results at the search engines until your domain is recognized as having a bit of authority. Also, don't smoke crack. Crack makes you crazy. Crazy people stab one another and hang out on street corners late at night.