Pop quiz: What do Anolis and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum have in common? Answer: A Google problem.
Rick Santorum’s google problem is that the first hits you obtain when you google “Santorum” are related to the author Dan Savage’s efforts to criticize Santorum’s campaign against homosexuality.
What’s Anolis‘s google problem?
Try googling Anolis for yourself to see what I’m talking about. The second hit you’ll see should take you to the page of Anolis, a “leading European LED manufacturer.” The fact that google directs you to a company named Anolis rather than to information about our favorite lizards isn’t what I find problematic. In fact, I was initially proud to know that a high-tech company had adopted the name. The problem is their logo, which depicts an old world chameleon rather than an anole!
If one thing is clear its that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, it seems to be getting worse; when Jonathan Losos posted on googling Anolis last February, the LED comany was the third link behind links to Wikipedia pages about Anolis lizards. If a presidential candidate can’t solve his google problem what are us lowly anole biologists to do? Perhaps we can reason with the company and convince them to replace their logo with an actual anole?
- JMIH 2014: Early Records of Fossil Anolis from the Oligocene and Miocene of Florida, USA - August 13, 2014
- JMIH 2014: Relative Contribution of Genetic and Ecological Factors to Morphological Differentiation in Island Populations of Anolis sagrei - August 7, 2014
- JMIH 2014: The Ultrastructure of Spermatid Development within the Anole, Anolis sagrei - August 5, 2014
220mya
I guess we just need Dan Savage to write about Anolis the polychrotid lizard! Or have thousands of people access Anole Annals through a Google search…
Jonathan Losos
Anoles also have a Twitter problem, which will be the subject of a forthcoming post.
Leo Fleishman
All things being equal I’d rather have the Anolis problem than the Santorum problem.