And you thought I made this stuff up…  A couple of posts ago I was bemoaning spam comments being posted to this blog, and posited a scenario where people were looking for videos of dwarves blowing goats and found my site by mistake. Well, sure enough, it’s happened.
I have some basic statistics software running against my site, which tells me (amongst other things) what sites have referred visitors to mine (I mentioned this last time) and also what search terms people used when they were directed to my site by Google (96% of the time) Yahoo (2%), or one of the other search engines (also 2%). And one of the recent visitors was indeed searching for “dwarf porno”. Really. They must have been really disappointed to land on my diatribe against sick perverts. Serves them right. I hope they lost their hard-on.
Now, a lot is made of the value of the search engine industry (witness Microsoft’s recent multi-billion-dollar offer for Yahoo – not worth it according to the stats above), but until search engines start returning useful results, I wouldn’t pay a thing for it.
The highest number of search-driven hits to my site (8% of all searches) are the result of a search for “the seven swear words” (or some variation thereof). The search engines drive them to Interrobang (‽) because I posted an article with a title of “The Seven Swear Words of Successful Managers“, which I thought was a clever play on the book The Seven Habits of Successful Managers and George Carlin’s “seven swear words you can’t say on television” routine. Now, it’s nice that my site ranks higher than Wikipedia (which has a sizable article on these) but it’s not really helping the searcher, is it?
I also titled a post “Black Boys On Mopeds“. This was an article about my dislike of the violence in England and justification for me expatriating. The title is a Sinead O’Connor song. It contains the lyrics (also featured in my ‘Lyrical Masterclass’ portlet) “This isn’t the land of Madam George and Roses | It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds | And I love my baby, and that’s why I’m leaving | I don’t want him to know any such thing as grieving”. I thought it was apposite for the article, but by using this title I have apparently (and unwittingly) suckered dozens of people who want to know the “meaning of black boys on mopeds” to my site. And they won’t find the answer here. Actually, to save them further searching, the lyrics refer to an incident in England on 17 May 1989 where the police were pursuing a youth called Nicholas Bramble, who was riding a moped, in the mistaken belief that he had stolen the moped. Bramble lost control of the moped (which it turns out was his) in the chase, and crashed it, killing himself. His death was ruled accidental, but O’Connor felt that the police, a “representative of state authority”, caused his death, and the incident (re)sparked accusations of racism in the police force, on the grounds that the police would not have assumed that the youth had stolen the bike, or pursued him so aggressively, had he been white. So now you know.
Another popular destination for search engines is an article I wrote on the Verve’s legal woes over their song Bittersweet Symphony. In this case I’m actually happy that people stumble upon my site, as I think the world should know what a little shit Alan Klein is. Ditto an article I wrote on AT&T’s appalling Uverse service – the more people get to hear about this the better.
But these rare exceptions aside, the search engines are directing people to my site for no good reason whatsoever. Another popular search term is “polish swear words” (a testament to the racial intolerance prevalent in Britain, where many Poles have migrated). I don’t have anything on my site about Polish swear words. Similarly I have nothing on “cannibals”, “workplace efficiency”, “chocolate moon bar”, “whittle short line” (no, that one’s entirely beyond me, too…), “men are wankers poems”, “boogers”, and even “goat” (unless you like the thought of a dwarf blowing one…).
To be fair, a lot of the search engines finger my site because of the titles I use for articles (witness the couple of examples above). Search engines will rank pages higher if the page title itself contains the search term. But most of my article titles are (deliberately) obtuse, or have at best a tangential reference to the article It’s all part of the reader’s fun, trying to work it out. Or not. Maybe it’s just me who thinks about this stuff, and I’m just being too clever for the search engines. Maybe to save searchers’ time, I should just dumb it all down and call these articles something literal. Like naming this one “Search engines don’t work”. But where’s the fun in that? Alternatively, I could just be happy at the increased hit count, and title everything “Online gambling” or “Free sex videos”. That seems to be pretty much all the Internet is used for, anyway…
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