Fun with Google, and Disappearing Apples

I don't know if there's an author out there who hasn't, at least once, done a vanity search on their own name on Google. It's one of those things that older and wiser authors tell you not to obsess about, though it's fun on occasion to see what's out there. Sometimes you come up with mentions of your books that you had no idea were out there. A number of authors with popular series available in ebook google from time to time to keep track of who's pirating their work. And sometimes you find things about yourself that you're not particularly happy about, though I haven't had that one happen yet.

I have found, however, that I'm not the only Pepper Smith out there. Go figure. My website is the first listing that comes up when you google my name, and a few of the other listings in the first ten pages or so are mine, but the vast majority are for other Pepper Smiths. Out of curiosity, I decided to follow the search out to 100 pages, but only got to page 81 before the same two listings kept coming up over and over again all by themselves. Beyond page 50, there were almost no mentions of the two names together, though most of the posts had both words, separately. From page 71 to page 79, there were three or four listings for this blog, for the post preceding this one.

Other than that, there were an astounding number of listings earlier in the search by other Pepper Smiths, including listings on Facebook, My Space, Twitter, posts on other people's blogs, listings for Pepper Smiths on high school reunion sites--at least the listing for the porn star seems to have disappeared. If you run across a Pepper Smith on Facebook, My Space, or Twitter, or one of the school reunion sites, it's not me. I'm on Crimespace, but that's about it for the social networking sites.

Our apple tree has presented us with a mystery this year. It had a number of small apples on it earlier this summer, green, but gradually reddening. They shouldn't have been ripe and ready until around now. However, they vanished about a month ago. I noticed them one day when I was hobbling out to the car to go somewhere, and a week later, they were gone. I checked the tree, and I checked the ground around it, and they're nowhere to be seen. I can only conclude someone picked them all, but I'm not sure when or why. They couldn't have tasted very good. We have a number of friends who come by and pick some when the apples are ripe, but there will be none for them to pick this year.

Oh well, maybe next year.

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