There Is No Cat - Billions and billions

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Monday, May 23, 2005

Billions and billions

It sets my teeth on edge every time one of my clients at work asks me to insert a link into their deathless prose using the words "click here" or "more" (the latter mandated as a corporate standard many years ago). So I got curious; what comes up if you search for these terms on Google?

Click here (1.17 billion results)

Adobe Reader - Download
XE.com - The Universal Currency Converter ®
Apple - QuickTime - Download
MapQuest.Com Maps, Directions and More
Macromedia Flash Player Download Center
PayPal - Welcome
Rhapsody & RealPlayer - the best audio and video players - Real.com
Netscape Browser
Download Center (for Microsoft Windows Media Player)
Internet Explorer Home

More (2.36 billion results):

Then again, given the prominence of the companies who come up when you search for these terms, maybe using "click here" and "more" count as best practices.

Posted at 4:46 PM

Comments

Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

I like how Salon handles it - each page of a document links to every other page. It gives the reader more control and shows how long the document is.

Posted by Kelly at 3:45 PM, May 25, 2005 [Link]

ralph, i went to the top few pages of those results, but couldn't find the words "click me" anywhere on the pages! except for xe.com, where the Click Me was an image in an advertisement.

so, why are they coming up in the search results?

Posted by deb at 3:33 AM, May 27, 2005 [Link]

Given the way Google works, I imagine it's more that pages that link to them use the words "click here". So there are undoubtedly countless pages all over the net that tell users to go download Acrobat using the words "click here".

Posted by ralph at 9:12 AM, May 27, 2005 [Link]

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio