searching for librarians to chat with

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Mon, 2009-10-12 11:07

For a few months now, we've been the #1 hit on Google for 'chat with a librarian', ahead of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.

Today as I was demonstrating this to someone, I noticed something else. Someone is paying Google to sponsor a link for this search, trying to steal our traffic. Maybe we're on to something?

I also notice that this company claims to have 82 librarians online. The sponsored link doesn't work when I click it. Any one of you 82 librarians reading this want to comment?

Comments

I couldn't help clicking the

Submitted by Grace (Cedar Mill Community Library) on Tue, 2009-10-13 16:58.

I couldn't help clicking the sponsored ad - when I checked it right now it said 292 librarians. Boy, check out the Terms of Service - not confidential, no employees (all people just users of the site)

http://ww2.justanswer.com/tos
LizP (AKA Grace)
Cedar Mill/WCCLS

I should add the above is

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Tue, 2009-10-13 16:20.

I should add the above is for people who clicked on 'Chat with a librarian' directly from Google search results. More people that find our site via Google or other search engines and eventually begin a chat.

I suspect you are right that

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Tue, 2009-10-13 12:49.

I suspect you are right that there are geographic differences, but I should add that Google Webmaster Tools confirms we are #1 for this query (caveat, this is "The highest position any page from your site ranked for that query").

But we do get quite a few sessions referred directly from Google:

2009	Chats referred from Google	All chats	% coming from Google
Jan	51	3,207	2%
Feb	122	3,111	4%
Mar	145	3,183	5%
Apr	259	4,225	6%
May	198	3,473	6%
Jun	161	1,918	8%
Jul	88	1,222	7%
Aug	71	1,212	6%
Sep	192	1,736	11%
Oct	75	1,196	6%

The interesting thing to me is that someone is paying for a sponsored link for this search - maybe in Portland but not Olympia? Can anyone else report that they see or don't see the sponsored link and shout out your location?

Keeping in mind that Google

Submitted by on Tue, 2009-10-13 10:58.

Keeping in mind that Google does have various ways to know where you are and feed you more "local" results (and it does), I wonder if this would be true for a someone searching in New York. Ask-WA shows up on top for me, but I think that's because I added it via GoogleWiki and promoted it to the top. I tried to remove the feature but it still stayed up there.

I didn't see the advertised link, either. Very strange ...