You may have heard about the rankmaniac assignment for the Science of the Web course at CMU. My professor, Adam Wierman is a friend of the professor of that course, Luis von Ahn, and decided to do a similar assignment for CS 144 at Caltech. (Here's the actual assignment (Google Viewer link for PDF))
Here's the essence of the assignment:
Your task: Working in groups of 2-3, your objective will be to create a page that will rank as highly as possible among the search results on Google and/or Bing for the query “rankmaniac 2010”. You will be evaluated based on the ranking of your page for this search query on March 4, 2010 (about a month from now). Note that we are giving you this much time because it typically takes a few weeks for a new page to be crawled and indexed by Google/Bing, so you’ll have to start right away!
Now for the twist:
To motivate you, we’re bringing a little competition and school pride to the table. Students at CMU attempted to do this last year, for the search query “rankmaniac” as part of their course “Science of the web” – we expect Caltech students to ‘outrank’ their best efforts!
TLDR: We want to be the first page in Google and Bing for the phrases rankmaniac 2010 and rankmaniac
Anyhow, if you want to help me with this assignment, just link to this page with something like this:
Patrick is a <a href="http://skyshard.net/rankmaniac.html">Rankmaniac 2010</a>