“The only thing that should surprise us is that there are still some things that can surprise us.”
— Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I’m not generally one to obsess over SEO or site rankings or any kind of traffic analysis, but occasionally, I will poke around and see what comes up on searches, just for my own amusement. For the most part, this whole web site is for my own amusement, and I don’t really expend a lot energy trying to obtain an audience or generate any kind of interest. Mainly, I just like to create stuff or see what I can do, and then share it with anyone who might have a similar interest. So it surprises me quite a bit to search the web for something and find this site listed twice in the top 5 search results and also be the source of the definitive answer to the top question in the People also ask section of the results:
There are quite a number of web sites out there that discuss this topic, so that just seems pretty amazing to me, all things considered. Let’s face it, my little tidbits of amateur hackery are pretty insignificant compared to the massive volumes of information out there dedicated to the ServiceNow product. I guess I should pay more attention, but I just did not expect to see that.
The other question that this brought to my mind was, why the sn-record-picker Helper? I mean, that was well over a year ago, and there are quite a few other areas of ServiceNow explored on this site. That was basically just a short two-part series, not counting the later correction. The sn-record-picker (also written and searched on as snRecordPicker, although that returns different results) is definitely a Service Portal thing, but I have written about a number of other Service Portal elements such as customizing the data table, dynamic breadcrumbs, integrated help, my delegates widget, my content selector and associated configurator, Highcharts, @mentions, a user directory, and my personal favorite, the snh-form-fields. Outside of the Service Portal, you can find other ServiceNow elements here such as the REST API, the Excel Parser, the Flow Designer, Webhooks, System Properties, Event Management, and a host of other just-as-interesting(?) topics. So what was so special about the sn-record-picker? I have no idea.
Still, it is interesting stuff. At least, it was interesting to me. One day I may invest a little more time into figuring out what drives such things, but other than finding it rather amazing when I stumble across it, I don’t see myself investing a whole lot of time on trying to manipulate or manufacture such results. It’s much more fun to me to build stuff and throw out Update Sets for people to pull down and play around with. Plus, if you have to manipulate the results artificially, then your place in the results is more of a reflection of your manipulation skills rather than the value of the content. I could build an article like this one that repeats the words sn-record-picker and snRecordPicker over and over again, just to see what happens, but no one wants to see that. At least, I don’t think so. Personally, I think my time would be much better spent getting back to building stuff, which is what I like to do anyway!
But there is a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing your own site show up on such a list. These things have a way of constantly shifting over time, though, so we’ll see how long it lasts.
