New experiment

Today’s experiment is to see which search engines follow URIs found in the cite attribute of the <q/> and <blockquote/> elements. Like the last experiment, it’s not exhaustive and hardly scientific; this is just to satisfy my own curiosity. There’s a slight oddity that I’ll point out: I insert the cite and title attributes on <blockquote/> elements into the DOM dynamically through the use of Javascript. To my knowledge no search engines attempt to process scripts of any sort so this shouldn’t affect the results.

The data:

This page is part one of a search engine experiment.

This page is part two of a search engine experiment.

To see the results, search for the page titles as phrases in your favourite search engine: there are no hits for them at this point and I believe they’ll remain unique for some time to come.

Another similar experiment might be to see if the text in the title attribute of any element that supports it is indexed by any engine.

Music to experiment by: And The Stars Keep On Shining, from Roam by Lisa Patterson.