Googling Montrose Peace Vigil

[Brian]

Roberta shot this photo in February 2012. Montrose Patch still has another shot on its website.

It had been a long time since I typed "Montrose Peace Vigil" for a Google search. There were always surprises, but most of the links that came up were familiar newspaper articles or calendar listings by groups like United for Peace and Justice from the previous decade -- or, ironically, posts about Montrose Peace Vigil on the now extinct Glendale Peace Vigil website. Last night, I tried again and was delighted to see this message board prominent as the first search result. What else I found is worthy of a new thread.

Let's start with this long post by Katya on Blogspot in May 2011, which appeared on the first page of my search, reporting on the Glendale and Montrose Peace Vigils. She writes about her conversations with Nancy, Julianne, Sharon, Vahraz, Norm, Pearl and Henry in Glendale. Then she goes to Montrose to talk to Roberta, Nancy and Jeanne. Anybody see this webpage? I loved it:

beyondthebluedomes.blogspot.com/2011/05/peace-vigil-bring-our-troops-back.html

I'll be back with more links about Montrose Peace Vigil in the larger Internet community. Add yours too!

[Sharon W]

Katya is Catherine Yesayan - she's on my Glendale Human Relations Coalition email list and often stops by when we have a booth at an event like Cruise Night. Her son Erik is on the Planning Commission and active in Walk, Bike Glendale promoting sustainable transportation. Great family.

[Brian]

Thank you so much, Sharon, for filling us in about Katya. Her blog post was quite a find. I'm back with a more recent result from my Google search and a familiar one from 2011. But first, another photo.

This photo from October 5, 2012 on our message board appears smaller on the website linked below.

Remember last fall when Mike asked us to hold signs for Keep Space for Peace Week at a Montrose Peace Vigil? He probably knows Bruce Gagnon, who included Anni's photo on his webpage. Scroll about halfway down, then click on our photo to see the full-size version, just like here:

space4peace.blogspot.com/2012/10/space-week-photos_14.html

Nancy's posts on Yoko's imaginepeace.com about the War Is Over Mending Circle that we set up at two Montrose Peace Vigils are still being archived there. Click on this webpage, then scroll past the delightful downloads of the poster in many languages. About three-quarters down, you'll see Nancy's two comments in late September 2011, which include working links to this message board:

imaginepeace.com/warisover/archives/1

Edited to add: That page has changed. Now, you need to click on PREVIOUS COMMENTS below the posters, then scroll only a little more than halfway down the page. You'll see Nancy's name twice with the links to this board.

[Roberta]

I don't know Bruce Gagnon, but I obtained (via a donation to his group), the "Keep Space for Peace" signs and had us hold them. Maybe Mike send him a photo, or I sent the link to our message board posting to Mr. Gagnon, don't remember at this point!

Good timing that you post this -- Peace in Space week is coming around Oct. 5-12 2013. I will make a donation for signs again

[Brian]

I just discovered that the Googlebots are not only linking to parts of the Montrose Peace Vigil message board that most of our members do not use, they are taking snapshots of us writing our posts.

As everyone who has posted here knows, when you click on "reply" in any thread, you get a page with a field to compose your post. Below that, the page you're replying to appears in a condensed format. Well, I found links to posts by Anni, Sharon and me in the September vigils thread before we posted them. But I only got those Post Message links when I clicked on Google's option to see the omitted similar results.

The regular search with "Montrose Peace Vigil" in quotes yielded three pages of results. I was surprised to find all 141 posts of the Brian's Blog thread on one page instead of the 15 it takes up on the message board. I hadn't used the "print" function that's available in the blue bars that head every thread for many years. It seems that the Googlebots are drawn to the printer friendly versions of this board.

[Roberta]

I wish that I understood all this, Brian, and am so glad you do.

Here's something from my email that I do understand:

Well, that was awkward. A Nobel Peace Prize nominee meets with a Nobel peace laureate and his family, and asks him to stop killing innocent people in her country with drones.

President Obama invited Malala Yousafzai, a 16-year-old Pakistani advocate for girls' education, to meet with his family. And she promptly explained that what he is doing works against her agenda and fuels terrorism.

Register your awareness and agreement here.
act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180

[Brian]

That's fantastic, Roberta! I also got that Roots Action e-mail you quoted, and no doubt thanks to you, I saw that Montrose Peace Vigil is listed among the sponsoring organizations there and on the petition itself, with a link to this message board. I got the e-mail just after 11 a.m. Wednesday, and it's probably no coincidence that the board had hundreds of hits within half an hour. When I left for work, 90 guests had visited in the past 24 hours, pretty typical. When I got home, we had 668, more than doubling our record.

My previous post was so confusing that even Anni, who is an administrator of the message board, didn't know what I was trying to say. I'm sorry for that. It's just that I was surprised to learn that the Googlebots click on everything, not just the threads -- they click on the function icons too. Like you do when you write a post, they click on "reply" or "quote." I never knew that Google offered links to those weird looking pages in expanded searches for anyone who's curious. Or the screens you get with the "print" function, which gives you a printer friendly version of an entire thread. Try it sometime.

Oct 14, 2013 23:22:07 GMT -8 Brian said:

I just discovered that the Googlebots are...taking snapshots of us writing our posts.

I was wrong. They were actually taking pictures of themselves pretending to quote us in posts. As for why these results would show up before the regular posts on this board, I'll have to ask somebody who knows.

[anni]

It's a million times easier to understand with Brian's new, improved post AND if you Google us here:

www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=montrose+peace+vigil&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[Brian]

Earlier on this page, I posted a photo taken at an October 2012 Montrose Peace Vigil of us holding signs for Keep Space for Peace Week that appeared in a roundup about the week’s observances elsewhere on the Web. This year, the folks who run the website of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space gave us a much bigger spread. Scroll down about two thirds on this link for “Vigils in Montrose” --

space4peace.org/reports/ksfpw_actions_13.htm

After a link to the post on this message board in the October vigils thread that provided the copy and the first two photos of our entry, they also ran three other photos of us from that page and the September vigils thread as well. By the way, what excellent company we had that week, around the world.

[Brian]

Montrose Peace Vigil's 40th anniversary celebration of John and Yoko's first Bed-In in March 2009.

The Montrose Peace Vigil message board is well into its sixth year, yet somehow I never searched "Montrose Peace Vigil" on Google Images. The Googlebots that always visit here have yielded an astounding variety of photos and images -- most of my search results linked directly to this message board. Along with many group vigil shots on the corner, I got photos of the steam train on our last vacation, seven of Anni's paintings and both of our cats. (Bernard is pleased that his search ranking came in higher than Snaggy's.) From elsewhere on the Web, the photo above resides in a Photobucket account linked to the old Glendale Peace Vigil website.

I know that my search results are probably skewed by Google's algorithm personalized to my browsing habits, which are centered on this message board. So I love to hear what others see when they search Montrose Peace Vigil on Google Images.