Congrats to The Onion... "THE" Number 1 Site

Anybody who has read The Onion will know about the power of great journalism and how vital it is to our civilization. It is a classic example of building a following and expanding largely by word of mouth because of its excellence in reporting. Satirical as it all may be.

But what I found fascinating regarding The Onion comes straight from Google's search results. I was just curious to see what results came up when I searched the word "the". Out of 10,040,000,000 estimated results, The Onion came up #1. Quite impressive! This is clearly a triumph in search engine optimization (SEO), a marketing tactic that helps websites get to the top of the list for search engine results... whether or not The Onion did this intentionally remains to be seen. But I thought I should point out that for the search on the word "the", The Onion managed to top such venerable institutions as:

-#2: The White House (well, maybe not quite so venerable, but I digress)
-#3: A Wikipedia entry about "the"
-#4: The Economist
-#5: T.H.E.-- Technology Horizons in Education (seems rather amazing that they didn't come up #1 since THE is the title of the publication!)

As you can see, the legend of The Onion continues to grow. So to all of THE writers at THE Onion, keep up THE great work... and keep showing THE White House how to do THE job right!