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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Thursday, September 25, 2003
18:30 - Google Perpetuates an Injustice
http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/philip/trident.html

(top) link
Okay, this just gives me warm fuzzies for some weird reason.

So there's this guy, right? Back in 1995, when he's like in high school and tinkering around with his 386 (like I was at the same time), he finds he needs drivers for his Trident video card. He goes on a newsgroup for video cards and posts a message asking about the drivers, which he later finds. All is well.

Or so he thinks. So begins a nightmare.

However, a YEAR later I started getting messages about Trident Video Drivers two or three times a week. People had seen my question and had somehow concluded that I was a representative of Trident and responsible for their lack of drivers, any random GPFs on their machines, etc. Needless to say, I was not particularly enthused.

I put up this page and crossed my fingers. Sure enough, the hidden counter on this page shows that it was accessed over 300 times in the first month or so it was up. Since I seem to have accidentally become one of the foremost sources for Trident Video Driver information on the WWW, I thought I would at least make whatever information I know available.

This page you are reading contains all I know about Trident Video Drivers. Please don't email me questions about drivers. I do not work for Trident either as employee or as a consultant. The only reason this page is here is to save me from having to deal with all the messages I receive.

And they presumably still send this guy messages about problems with their Trident video cards to this day. Why? Because if you do a Google search on "trident video", the first link returned is that of Trident Microsystems' corporate site... and the second is this guy's venerable page.

He'd hoped that putting up that site would save him from having to answer all those e-mails. He'd hoped that people would find the site, read his story, become enlightened as to the nature of Trident Microsystems' video chipsets and the non-presence of information about them on his site, and go away. He'd hoped that as Trident faded from the market, people would stop sending him those queries.

And now his site is Googlewhacked. And people like me, looking on a whim for Trident's corporate site to see if they still exist, stumble onto it and post thoughtless links to his page. So Googlebots can crawl all over it, its hit ranking can climb ever higher, and he becomes by accident the de facto authority on Trident technology on the Internet.

All because of one innocent newsgroup post in 1995.

Self-healing system, my ASS!


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© Brian Tiemann