• The Search Engine Community Pulled Together to Find One of Their Own

  Filed under Foo
  Jul 1

  I witnessed the most beautiful thing today. A huge group of people around the world worked together to help someone they barely knew.

  Ian Turner, a member of the search engine marketing community was missing for 4 days after attending the WebmasterWorld search conference held in New Orleans. After one huge post on Threadwatch.org people began banding together to try to help Ian’s wife Ali — who lives in the UK — to find her missing husband.

  Posts of Ian’s description went up on many different bulletin boards including SearchEngineWatch.com, Google’s blog, Yahoo’s blog, WebmasterWorld, and numerous blogs and different sites all over the internet. Chat rooms were alive with theories, and people all wondered what they could do to help. Many used their contacts with media companies to run the story on different local news stations. People in New Orleans who barely knew Ian called hospitals and hotels asking people to post his picture. Even a Pay per click campaign was started on Google and Overture on the keyterm “Ian Turner” to help authorities quickly find the gathered information. And, in one day nearly $7,000 was raised to hire a private investigator to look into the matter.

  When the word went out Ian was found, alive and well in Atlanta online chat rooms and bulletin boards were on fire spreading the happy news. It was one huge sigh of relief.

  I have never in my life seen such a beautiful act of kindness. It was a world wide collaberation. Ian, you are one fortunate man.

  No Comments

Leave a Reply