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Philipp Lenssen: Germany’s Google Source
Philipp Lenssen grew up in Germany, where kids weren’t allowed into arcades—you had to be over 18 to play. When his parents took him on vacations to other countries, he sought out the arcades first—just to watch the teens and grownups play Pac Man. He picked up his first English words this way, mainly from listening to players curse in English when they lost. At fifteen, Philipp began programming Pascal, and switched to QuickBASIC at around sixteen or seventeen. He used his father’s laptop to write his own “Choose Your Own Adventure” game when his crashed. Today, he’s a multi-talented person who writes, programs, and has artistic as well as technological gifts. He also created Google Blogoscoped, a blog that he claims is 80% about Google and 20% about everything else, including search marketing, programming, and every so often a personal topic. He created the blog in 2003 while he was staying in Malaysia. He was reading the Google Village blog at the time, and loved the content—but wanted to read a blog that was updated daily. In Google Blogoscoped, he created the blog he wanted to read. He highlights his artistic talents by creating digital logos for some of his more frequent commenters. While he’s known in the search community for his high-profile blogs, most notably Google Blogoscoped, Philipp has always worked as a programmer while maintaining his blogs. He first used free servers such as Geocities and Tripod, but got his own server after getting fed up with free services adding ads and pop-ups to his site. Philipp attracted the ire of a company called Search Engine Optimization, Inc. recently when he did a search for the company, and its site was nowhere to be found on Google. Philipp posted comments on his blog to the effect that Google’s new algorithms may have sounded the death knell for the company’s rankings because it was using “black hat” SEO techniques. The company responded by threatening to take legal action if Philipp didn’t take the page down. Not wanting to risk a lawsuit, he did—but many others in the search community responded by posting copies of his entry on their sites in protest of what they feel was an unwarranted and undeserved threat from SEOInc. Philipp is the author of the widely read 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google, a book of games, programming tips, weird facts, stories, and more about the most popular search engine on the web. He currently lives with his wife in Stuttgart, Germany. Useful website
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