Well – says he carefully, in consideration of this being the punchline of a really good shaggy dog story – this is a trifle bizzare…

Like all good obsessive-compulsive neurotics with a new toy, I decided to feed the word Dropsafe into Google this morning, having taken the site live two days ago and having checked on monday what else was there.

As expected, Dropsafe became instantly the top Google match for the keyword, basically because the crypticide.com website is already a reasonably highly-ranked domain, and therefore it would be pretty high up the pagerank ladder.

Now, after lunch, it seems to have disappeared from Google altogether; I am not particularly fussed about this since Google has a rather organic database, and I expect it will surface again sometime later.

In the interim: a curious site that I discovered in the process of research is [public.www.planetmirror.com] – which seems to be taking The Wayback Machine‘s approach of mirroring the entire internet and getting the results indexed, presumably in the expectation that everyone and their dog will take their content retreivals to their site.

Which (purely incidentally of course) is laden with advertising links.

It certainly strikes me as a novel method to subvert the thinking behind PageRank – I wonder if someone actually said “Let’s duplicate the entire web!”

I don’t think the process can be wholly automatic, though – an out-of-date copy of my website is archived in its entirety at http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/crypticide/. Notice the lack of a fully-qualified-domain-name in that URL. This implies to me that the mirroring is elective, on the part of someone other than me.

Someone chose that pathname.

[public.www.planetmirror.com] is their FAQ. Does anyone know what they’re actually about? Or (given that they are in Brisbane) do they exist purely to buffer the mythically overloaded Australian net links?