Google hegemony, n.: the degree to which a specific person dominates the results of a Google search on their own name.
So if you search Google and nine of the first ten references are specifically about you (and not someone else with your name), then you have Google hegemony over your name.
A mathematical index of Google hegemony has yet to be developed. (Hint, hint. Comments?)
(hegenomy?)
Because ultimately you have to go through and decide which pages are and aren’t yours, its probably best to keep things fairly simple. One way of doing it might be that your GHI (google hegemony index) would be the number of the first link that is about someone other than you. So if your GHI is 1, the first link isn’t about you, and your name is not your own in Google’s eyes. If your GHI is 101, then you would actually have to hit `next’ 10 times on google to find the first non-you link, and you clearly 0wn your name on Google.
Maybe your GHI should be the number of the first non-you link minus 1; then if you’re not the first link, your GHI would be zero, which makes a little more sense.
That’s a good start. (Hegemony, by the way. Definitely hegemony.) The number of the first non-you link minus one is now officially the Provisional Google Hegemony Index.
But what it doesn’t capture is the breadth of dominance. If you’re 90 out of the top 100 hits on Jonathan Dursi, but Jonathan Dursi the (hypothetical) tennis instructor from Leeds is number 12, should that count for more than having only 60 of the top 100 hits but having sole possession of the top 14 spots?
By the same token, do I have too much free time on my hands?
— Rob (PGHI=11) Cottingham
The problem is that each position in the list is more
important than the one after it, but by an unknown amount.
(Back in the day, Google used to provide crude PageRank
information, but that just gave too much information to those
trying to game the system).
If all the pages were nearly tied for rank, than doing
something like you suggest — say, use a `N of the first 100 links’
for the GHI — would be clearly the right thing to do, since
distinguishing between the ranks of the links isn’t significant.
If on the other hand, Google thinks the first link has vastly higher
rank than the second, which has vastly higher rank than the third,…
then the `first non-you’ measure is the right measure, since
any links below that one are of negligable importance. For
anything in between, what you really want to calculate is a
average of all the links that are you weighted by the (unknown)
page rank. But you can’t do that, and you can’t even
distinguish between which of the two cases you’re closest to.
One possibility is to report both numbers; GHI = 11, 90/100.
Or call one the Google Rank Index and the other the Google
Dominance Index or something. Another is to just pick one.
(Yes, I’m taking this too seriously)
And you’re sure you don’t like `hegenomy?’
Let me mull over hegenomy… I hastily thought you were trying to correct my spelling. (And I now realize how horribly misguided I was.)