Victory

Campaign Update

Important update!—I'm not so keen on having the picture I'm using hosted by Flickr. In fact I don't even know if Flickr photos show up in GIS results. So I've switched to a copy of the picture hosted on Soylent Red. If you've helped with the campaign so far I'd really appreciate it if you could update your sites to point at the new image. Links to this post and to the blog are still fine.

Heather McNeil

There was always a temptation to use the most embarrassing picture I could find, but I've decided I want to go the honourable route in this competition. Partially because Heather McNeil is my friend and I don't want to embarrass her in front of the billions of Internet users, but mostly because I'm hoping that if I'm nice to her now then if I somehow lose the bet she might go easy on me with the forfeit. Self preservation is a very strong instinct, especially when there's an angry Scott about.

What the bet is about

This started out as a discussion on MSN Messenger about Heather McNeil's absence from Google results, specifically Image Search results. She claimed that she couldn't be found. I countered that I could get a picture of her to appear in the top 10 results for the search "Heather McNeil" within three months without using any insider tricks (disclaimer: I work for Google; this bet has nothing to do with them and is persued in my own time).

Aside

Specifically, the search is to be performed before the Raoky Road to Dublin Join Meet on September 8^th/9^th, a meeting of members of Danny Wallace's Join Me. We're a group that performs random acts of kindness to strangers to make the world a better place. I met Heather McNeil through this group.