While the readership for this blog is still…shall we say…extremely modest, the blog has somehow crawled its way up to the #1 result on Google for the search phrase “land and hold short,” ahead of more worthy targets such as the AOPA brief on land and hold short operations (perhaps my link will help push AOPA’s page back up). If there are any air accidents because pilots clicking on I’m feeling lucky got my page instead of the AOPA bulletin, well, I guess they weren’t so lucky after all.

It’s always fun to see a specialized use of a common word or phrase make it to the top of Mt. Google, as is the case with the Simple API for XML, beating out the common short form of “saxophone” for a Google search for “sax“, and Tim Bray’s Ongoing blog, topping out the Google results for “ongoing“. No points, of course, for coining something new, like “Slashdot” or “Kazaa”. Similarly, it’s to be expected that Cessna would have the top hit for the search “cessna“, but the fact that The New Piper, perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, has the top Google result for “piper” is probably leaving a lot of bagpipers seething and stomping in their kilts.