Interesting Little Find Today Re: Education Law Association
Justin Bathon on Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 6:27PM Today, I was wanting to take a quick look at the School Law Reporter published by the Education Law Association. I know they website: www.educationlaw.org, but I decided to take an easier route. So, as with all things these days, I quickly typed ELA into Google and ... scrolling ... scrolling ... hit next page ... ohh, found it, on Google's second page. Go ahead, try it for yourself - I'll Wait.
Now, a lot of educational institutions are not the first ones listed if you type in their acronym at Google. For instance, ECS is the second one listed, as is CEP. Also, not every educational association comes up first. UCEA comes up second, CIES comes up fourth, but ASHE, AEFA, and of course AERA all come up first. Anyway, the point is that the educational organization's acronym is usually one of the first five to come up on Google so it can be immediately seen a clicked on, redirecting the user to the site they wanted.
So, who are these other ELAs that are coming up on Google before our ELA? Well: ELA Lighting (Hollywood, CA); ELFA's "We've Moved" page; an ELA group of landscape architects in Pennsylvania; the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation; ELA (some British band I never heard of); the "Extended Live Plugin" of some French blog; Technorati's ELA search results; and the homepage of the Edinburgh Landlord Accrediation site. Umm.....yeah.....not good.
This might be no big deal, except that on their front page the Education Law Association presents themselves as "ELA" so you would think they would pop up in a search for ELA. Also, if you are aware of the algorythm that Google uses, you will know that it is based on the number of other sites that refer to it. In this way, Google determines a level of importance, and accordingly ranks and presents those results to you when you search. But, just in case you think this is just a Google problem here are some other engines: Yahoo, second page No. 13, MSN, bottom of page 3, Vivisimo (meta search engine), No. 122; Ask.com, page 12 (I actually was not sure if I was going to find it at all on Ask.com!!!). So, Google is actually doing the best job for ELA.
So, what this means is that according to Google (and the other search sites), all those other ELAs listed above are more important that our ELA because other highly relevant sites are not linking to the Education Law Association, which is sort of embarrassing.
By the way, our ELA's motto pastered right on the front page: The premier source of information on education law.
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