Sant and Gonzi on the internet

This weblog, which hit cyberspace on Christmas day, is already attracting attention from some quality sources. The pioneer of Maltese blogging, Toni Sant plans to feature Wired Temples on his blog in the coming days. A leading Sunday newspaper The Malta Independent on Sunday today features a story (page six of the printed edition) referring to a post in this blog entitled Sant and Gonzi. The newspaper quotes this blog and confirms the Google gap between Sant and Gonzi. This gap is of course not unrelated to the fact that Sant has been prominent on the Maltese political stage over a longer period of time. The Google check by the Sunday paper was apparently made without using quotation marks (" ") resulting in many more pages for both Sant and Gonzi with less accuracy. Do your personal checks. Always use quotation marks in internet search engines for better results. From the item on the Malta Independent about Wired Temples:

Sant and Gonzi slog it out on the Internet

Support for the two most prominent political leaders in Malta, Prime Minister Laurence Gonzi and Opposition Leader Alfred Sant is usually evenly balanced according to most opinion polls.

But not if you take the Google search engine as an indicator! If you look for “Alfred Sant” on Google you come up with 11,200 entries. If you google “Lawrence Gonzi” all you get is 121. Yes just 121 entries. If you restrict yourself to pages from Malta the gap is even wider – 4,460 hits for Sant and 22 hits for Gonzi.

This was affirmed by a new weblog, Wired Temples, put together by former Labour MEP candidate Robert Micallef. But a check carried out by this newspaper has shown that there are 146,000 entries for Dr Sant and 12,600 for Dr Gonzi.

Sant has been leader of his party for a longer period but with the general election only three years away, Gonzi has a lot of catching up to do, commented an entry in the blog.


In an odd twist, next to the Wired Temples story, the printed edition of the paper has a photo of Mr Anthony 'Temple' who is in Malta on his 65th visit. In 2003, a Government press release recorded his 6oth visit to Malta.


Toni Sant, founder and artistic director of MaltaMedia Online network, has posted some comments to Wired Temples. In addition, the search site aboutmalta.com has added - Wired Temples Malta on the Web - to it's links.

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