An Egyptian Refrigerator Repairman Outranks Google In Search

Mr Saber El-Toony

An Egyptian repairman has found unexpected fame as one of the most searched-for men in his country.

For some time now, anyone typing Google into Google from an Egyptian computer got a page belonging to Mr Saber El-Toony, a refrigerator repairman, as the first result despite the fact that his business doesn't include the keyword and is in no way related.


His Google Plus page has received more than five million views but Google said it was looking into the issue which appears to have been fixed.

The quirk was uncovered by Eyad Nour, a digital marketer from Egypt, who wrote up his findings on publishing platform medium. He contacted Mr Sabel El-Toony, who said that he had not done anything to promote his page.

In fact, other than a vast increase in the number of phone calls he had received, he seemed unaware of his new high ranking."So people think I am the 'mother company' of Google? That is great." Saber said.

How it happened!

Oliver Ewbank from “Search Engine Optimisation” firm Koozai told the BBC: "Google Plus profiles tend to rank well in search results, but never on this scale.

The only explanation to this was that Mr Saber El-Toony had entered a Google search results page for his username "ssabereltony" into the website field on his Google Plus page.

"The main link between this listing and the keyword Google is the fact that Mr Saber El-Toony entered a Google Search for his Twitter handle in the website URL field. This Google URL field seems to have caused the search engine to think the profile is a relevant search result.

"From Mr El-Toony's perspective, this was a happy accident; for Google this was a mistake. As Google pride themselves on relevance they will want to make sure this does not happen again
If that turns out to be the explanation for his number-one ranking it suggests "all you have to do to outrank Google itself is to change the website URL in your Google Plus profile", he said.