You may have read in recent days that somewhere under the Franco-Swiss border, they are currently powering up the world’s largest and most advanced light-bending doughnut, something called the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC for short).

If the warnings of impending world-annihilation due to accidental black holes and that type of thing have got you cowering under your bed covers, then you’re sadly overlooking the real issue. Just because this is arguably the greatest threat to mankind so far, it doesn’t eclipse the fact that is going to jeopardise where my website shows up in Google.

I very much doubt that Professor Peter Higgs was thinking about me and my Google placement when he sketched out his picture of the Higgs Boson in 1963, but that’s exactly the type of systemic, sloppy and myopic academic attitude that I’m talking about.

Until now I have been lucky enough to maintain a healthy and respectable place in the Google search for ‘Higgs’ - usually somewhere around page four or five on the .com side of things (higher on the .co.uk). But even so, I’ve always played second fiddle to the elusive Higgs Boson or ‘God Particle’ - it fills up about forty of the results ahead of me, and it doesn’t even ‘exist’ yet.

I’ve not made a fuss about it before, but all I’m saying is that if you decide to do a few sums which one day you plan to swap for a Nobel Prize, my view is that it’s bad form to wait forty-five years to go and claim it. It’s like redeeming a book token you were given for the Christmas of 1993; you simply should just accept it’s probably expired by now. Clearly, if you really wanted a book in the last fifteen years you’d have used it already. QED. 

I suppose the real problem isn’t Peter Higgs. It’s a guess, but I assume there’s probably some extremely convoluted family tie between us back in the 1500s or something.  I can’t therefore blame him out of a strong sense of family loyalty, and as it might be a bad idea to piss on the bonfire of the only member of your family who is likely to win a Nobel Prize this year (again, I wasn’t asked) I’ll blame the entire world’s media and scientific community instead.

Just because we get to the brink of the last major breakthough in particle physics, it doesn’t mean journo’s should go around writing long and informative articles about it willy-nilly. Some of us run respectable web design businesses and we’re trying to make a living. All of us have accidently Googled our names weekly (don’t deny it). All this publicity must be very nice for Professor Higgs (I’ll call him Uncle Pete from now) but who really reads all that that sciencey stuff anyway? There’s only so much room on the internets anyway - you’d be far better filling it up with my websites than some old tripe about a little bit of an atom which, by the way, if you dropped you’d never find again unless you had a 27km length of pipe and the GDP of a small African nation. Even then what are you going to do with it? It’s too small for anything useful anyway.

You might think I’m bitter. You might expect that I’m hoping that they never find that damned particle. You might think I’m concerned that I might get pushed onto page six of Google. Well I’m not. I’m just expressing the correct opinion that, like this theoretical bit of an atom or the guests of Jeremy Kyle, I have human rights too. It’s clearly and completely unjustified that one should be forced down the search results just because someone happens to have spent the best part of half a century theorising then proving the fundamental basis of science and the universe.

I don’t expect much sympathy, but just put yourself in my shoes. How many times in your life have you ever had to go head-to-head with something called the God Particle? A particle. From God. My guess is that if there is only one other person who understands the Google search algorithm as well as Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it’s probably Him. How can I, Andy Higgs, be expected to compete with that? There isn’t a SEO website in the world that tells you how to beat that sort of thing.

It’s totally unfair on me.

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