Spontaneous Publicity

Oh my God! The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! ...

Page 73, Johnson, Navin, R.!

I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity--your name in print--that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

      --Steve Martin, "The Jerk"

Several days ago, while searching to discover the truth behind Philip Roth's claim to have discovered a piece of paper with nineteen sentences that he subsequently turned into the opening lines of his first nineteen books, I repeatedly hit dead ends until I Googled:

"philip roth" "nineteen sentences"

and found this erudite link:

6° of Aberration
... nineteen sentences that taken together make no sense at all." An unattributed exercise by one or more authors (who knows ... The Human Stain, by Philip Roth. ...
sixdegreesofaberration.blogspot.com/ - 101k

Google had found my little oasis in cyberspace...okay, admittedly with a gentle nudge from yours truly—one can submit one's URL to their web crawler, Googlebot, and out of curiosity I had. But it was surprising nonetheless to see my recent posting turn up as a result of my own search term.

It also seems that Google, the owner of Blogger, the tool I use to author this blog, has not yet fully integrated their search and blogging technologies. It appears that Googlebot crawled and indexed only the top-level page of my URL http://sixdegreesofaberration.blogspot.com/ even though they claim that providing the top-level page is sufficient for their bots to crawl the entire site.

The template I use creates individual pages for every post, making it possible for me to provide convenient links back to earlier threads of discussion. To be properly indexed and searchable, Googlebot needs to crawl every page.

How else are things going to start happening to me now?