The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Looking At Google Looking At My Blog
|| 2/11/2010 || 12:51 am || + Render A Comment || ||

Screen grab of Google's Robot traversing my website

Above is a series of screen grabs showing Google’s webcrawler traversing my blog. From this robot’s data collection, the harvested content makes its way into Google’s servers, and ultimately into your search results.

Visual Trace Route – I’m 42 hops from Google
|| 4/21/2008 || 6:00 pm || Comments Off on Visual Trace Route – I’m 42 hops from Google || ||

For nearly four years (May 2004 to March 2008) this website was a digital experiment how people find content on the internet. By withholding the contents of this website from search engines I was able to create my own digital island that could be found only by those who knew me or when I would selectively release specific content. Last month, exactly one year after an internationally syndicated article was published about me and my website, I concluded the experiment by lifting the electronic Berlin Wall that prevented search engines from accessing the content on this website. For the last month or so, I’ve begun to watch how people are able to find my content through search engines, and frankly its been nothing short of amazing. In the not-so-distant future I will have a more detailed pre & post search engine analysis posted here.

While this website was unlisted and before the article was published, I used to look at my website IP logs every morning. I would manually trace the IP addresses of every visitor to this website and obtain a decent guesstimate of how the person found my website. This IP analysis would give the location and hosting provider of the visitor, but what it did not give is the digital path that my content traveled.

Data does not travel through the internet in a geographic path of least resistance (like as the crow flies), rather data bounces around the world from server to router to user in a path that can go in multiple directions and routed through multiple servers before finally reaching your computer. A trace route is a means to see what servers the content passes through before reaching you. By clicking on the image above you can explore how content travels to your computer using the Google Maps interface to see exactly where the content travels. For example, data from www.Google.com makes 42 unique hops before finally reaching my computer. A fun experiment would be to trace how content from this website arrives on your computer screen.

Watching the route trace itself looks much like a sped up version of “The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming,” which is a cartographically interactive story told through the Google Maps interface. Each stop becomes a new chapter in the information’s delivery. How many stops did this blog entry take to get to you?

Related GIS:

+ MORE

Here Be Dragons by David Montgomery
|| 3/14/2007 || 1:25 pm || Comments Off on Here Be Dragons by David Montgomery || ||

Front page of today’s Washington Post Style Section:

Here Be Dragons
Through Nikolas Schiller’s Eye, Aerial Maps of Familiar Places Become Terra Incognita
By David Montgomery

He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps — you can probably find your house in these maps — if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.

Nikolas Schiller, 26, is the god of this alternative reality. Making maps at a frenzied pace of one every two days for the past 1,000 days, he has done everything he could to keep himself off the map of the World Wide Web.

+ MORE

I’m off google
|| 7/24/2005 || 12:29 pm || Comments Off on I’m off google || ||

Last week I wrote an e-mail to Google because someone from Google had decided to visit my website a couple weeks back and cached the page they visited, even when I requested them to not do so.

In response to my e-mail, Google has completely removed even the listing of my website from their database! Before when you’d google “Nikolas Schiller,” the first result would be a link to my website- without any text just “https://nikolasschiller.com,” and now (if you clicked the link above) it doesn’t display that anymore and the first result is the Washington Post article from July 4th, 2004 on the Adbusters website.

I guess I’m even harder to find now :-)

The Daily Render By

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future.

::LAST 51 POSTS::

Fair Use

46 queries. 4.254 seconds.
Powered by WordPress

Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: