Lower East Side, Manhattan.

A guy from the press office of the Church of Scientology called yesterday to ask if a link to the church's Web site could be included in my story from last month on Scientology and Google. I pointed out that there already was such a link next to the story.

Later on I got curious about the request, so I called back and asked what prompted it. The person said it was "just to popularize the sites." I asked if this had anything to do with the Google ranking of Scientology.org, which recently slipped from #1 to #2 in a search for "Scientology." (Links from big sites might push it back up.) He hurriedly tried to transfer me elsewhere, then offered to have someone call me back. I said this wasn't necessary, but I noted that the registration barrier keeps Google from indexing NYT articles, so the link wasn't going to help anyway.

A followup to the little story I wrote about the Dallas Morning News' objections to "deep linking": The deep-linking site in question is getting some free legal help and has responded to the paper's complaint.