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February 03, 2005
Search and Ye Shall Find
It's that time again. I know this is a tired old blog-entry standby, but it makes me laugh and laugh every single time. Here are some of the search engine queries that led people to the Pickytarian in January...
www.moonrover.com
A perennial favorite. I wonder if people eventually catch on to the fact that, if they know a URL, they don't have to use a search engine. I'm thinking that they don't.
movie rape scenes
rape scenes
This had to have been Mark Millar.
titania vs she-hulk gallery
she hulk vs titania pictures
she-hulk wrestles with titania
My first reaction: "Wow! There sure is a lot of interest in that new She-Hulk series! Then I thought about the people specifically searching for pictures of She-Hulk wrestling with Titania and got kind of grossed out.
comic scans jonni future
But do you know what? At least there are some one-handed typists out there with taste. Glad I never mentioned Lady Death on this blog. Oh, wait. Damn.
bar
How far down the list of results must they have gone before they got to my site? And how disappointed must they have been when they finally saw my site?
get fuzzy strikingly handsome
I can think of a lot of adjectival phrases to describe Get Fuzzy, but "strikingly handsome" is not one of them.
daughter natasha black widow hawkeye
My comment thread has been raging with discussion about the relative lameness of Hawkeye. If he did indeed have a daughter with the Black Widow, I am going to have to bump him up a notch or too.
write resume teenagers
Step 1: read as many comic book blogs as possible. Step 2: Lie.
drawing scale mail
You had better be drawing a D&D character, and not some kind of Magic Cards or Warcraft piece of crap.
nick fury poser file
Actually I don't think Nick Fury is much of a poser. Dum-Dum Dugan, on the other hand...
star jones breast enlargement
Insert your own joke here.
reshaper crack
This person finds my site about once a month. I have no idea what in God's name he or she is looking for, but I need to find out before it drives me mad.
cow girl pumping
See, if I was really clever, I would have bunched this with the Star Jones comment and then asked you to make your own joke.
mind reading with andy
Griffith? Richter? Raggedy? If you can't be specific, I can't help you.
clamshell bikini
All I can think about is "Mermaid Man," the senile Aquaman parody from Spongebob Squarepants, voiced by Ernest Borgnine.
cosutmes
Guess I need to start spell-checking!
mini animals with element armor
OK, now this smells like some kind of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh crap, and that ain't any more welcome here than Magic Cards. It's D&D or nothing, ya little punks! The old school is the BEST school, and don't you forget it!
fix unhappy marriage
The only thing sadder than imagining the person searching on Google for a way to fix their unhappy marriage is imagining that person finding my blog.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at February 3, 2005 05:06 PM
Comments
Wait. How the hell do you figure out what search terms brought people to your site? Please share this glorious new magic with us.
Posted by: mj at February 3, 2005 07:35 PM
Well, if the general populace is anything like me, the reason you're seeing "www.moonrover.com" queries in your referrer logs is because they open up a new window, have Google set to their home page, and type the URL without realizing that the cursor is in the Google box instead of in the browser's location bar.
Or, well, maybe they just don't know where to put the URL, yeah.
Posted by: Steve Pheley at February 3, 2005 08:39 PM
mj,
The information about search phrases can be found in your site's server logs. One of the bits of information that the logs collect is the referring URL - so, for example, if somebody finds a link on Precocious Curmudgeon to The Pickytarian and clicks that link, their visit will show up in my logs as having come from PC's site. When you search for something on a search engine, the terms you enter are included in the URL of the results page. So when you follw a link from the results page, the search phrase is contained in the referring URL, and recorded in the destination site's log.
I have a stats program that analyzes my log files and presents the information is a series of chrats and graphs. One of the charts is "Search Engine Phrases." The stats program is free and relatively easy to install - you can find it at http://awstats.sourceforge.net
All this is easy because I am using a hosting service and I installed my blog software on my site. If you are using a hosted application like Blogspot or Blogger or Journalscape or some such, you wouldn't be able to install and use one of these log analyzer program. I suspect, though, that a lot of these services also offer a way to view your site's stats, and you might be able to find the search engine data there.
Whew!
Posted by: jdonelson_nyc at February 4, 2005 10:21 AM