Drug price control 4: Blog popularity in google, yahoo and bing

As I posted earlier on the "hockey stick" graph, this blog attracts a modest traffic. But there are some topics discussed in this blog that are picked up well by the major search engines. One such topic is "drug price control."

Try the following exercises:
1. Search in google.com "drug price control",
2. Search in yahoo.com "drug price control", and
3. Search in bing.com "drug price control".

As of today, here are the results:

Page 1 of google shows that 2 of the top 10 articles are from this blog. #3 is Part 1 of this series which I wrote last January 14, 2011.

#4 is Uncontrolled emotions in drug price control which I wrote last July 15, 2009. I'm very happy with the google result. Click this and the next 2 pictures to see their larger images.

. Next test, yahoo -- not one article from this blog landed on page 1 or the top 10 articles. But not to dismay, #1 is my paper, Access to medicines through politics: Preliminary assessment of drug price control policy in the Philippines posted in the MG Thinkers website, www.minimalgovernment.net. It's the paper that I presented in a conference in Singapore last October 2009, event jointly sponsored by the Americans for Tax Reforms (ATR), International Policy Network (IPN), Property
Rights Alliance (PRA), Acton Institute, and World Taxpayers Association (WTA). That paper is 33 pages long including tables and annexes.

#3 is my other paper posted in the MG website, Access to Medicines via Competition Not Protectionism and Price Regulation which I wrote last February 2010. It is 11 pages long.

#2 is an article in the Manila Bulletin, Philippine price controls hamper rise of generics, which is a reprint of an article by James Hookways and originally published in the Wall Street Journal last Jun 2010. I was briefly quoted in that articles by James:

Bienvenido Oplas, head of the Manila-based Minimal Government Thinkers Inc. think-tank and a member of the consultative panel advising the Philippines' Department of Health, said this means the price controls policy just isn't working. "It hasn't fulfilled its objective of making more drugs available to more people," he said....

In short, the top 3 articles on "drug price control" on yahoo search engine were either my long papers or an international news report that briefly quoted me. Again, I am happy with this result.

Next test is via bing.com, a search engine developed by Microsoft. On page 1 or the top 10 articles, #6 is my article in this blog, 2 opinions on drug price control which I wrote last September 22, 2009. I posted there portions of opinions written by Ding Generoso of BusinessMirror and Cito Beltran of Philippine Star.

And #9 is my article, Drug price control a year after last August 19, 2010. The article was originally published in The Manila Times that day.

So there. The high presence of some of my articles and long papers in the 3 big search engines is a good achievement by itself.

There's no wine or beer beside me, so I just sip a cup of coffee. :-)