Search Me

I get a kick out of seeing what searches lead folks here. While I’m always curious to
see the individual Posts listing in the Stats area of my Blogger control panel, I find
how people are landing on certain pages of the blog — and why, as much as one can hypothesize from the how — even more interesting than what those pages are.

Very often, I have little to no idea how a given search relates to what Google turns up, like so:

{craving for a holiday experience}

The above showed up this past December, and I discovered then that a Google Image search for the string would return the picture from last year’s hodgepodge dispatch on The Hulk, Evan Dorkin, and Twitter as a representative of the blog’s archive page for April 2011. It’s a mystery to me what the person(s) who input that string hoped to get, but despite their obvious curiosity over the image (they did click on through, after all) I doubt that they were looking for a doodle of Marvel’s jolly sullen green giant. Most folks don’t seem to know (or remember, or care) to use quotes in their Google searches when searching for a specific phrase — which I admit may not have been the case here — so, although pages where the words appear in close proximity to one another may show up higher in the search returns, a search will eventually turn to pages where the words may be scattered about in unrelated contexts.

For example, I got a chuckle recently over {sistine chapel nutella} just because it seems like such a non sequitur, but I also feel bad that the Google Image search that returned Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam as seen in December 2010’s “Stocking Stuff” did so purely because Nutella was listed as a label in this blog’s sidebar. [Note: Both that image and the sidebar labels, which grew far too numerous, are now gone.]

I wrote the other day that {alex carter} was the #1 search leading folks here last year — and that my June 2010 post “Vampire Weekend” got loads of hits from that search on Google Images even though there’s no actual photo of Alex Carter in that post. My links to photos of Scarlet Johansson and David Boreanaz in that post also garner hits for it.

And that brings me to another favorite search, {david boreanaz’ jaw/lip/cheek}. Yes, really.

I began checking the Traffic Sources section of my Stats multiple times throughout
the day, when possible, after realizing a few months ago that it was a gold mine of such quirky searches. The Stats page has to be visited often to find them, however, because they’ll cycle off the Now view quickly and not make it into the cumulative Day view unless they’re searched for repeatedly, which is unlikely due to their very quirkiness. More popular searches that linger in the Week, Month, and All Time views tend to be less amusing, if no less informative of what people are looking for and how my blog might be able to cater to their needs — Garrett Morris’s Chico Escuela character from Saturday Night Live is a perennial favorite, albeit well behind Alex Carter; {menorah first night} and {first night of chanukah} were big in the latter half of December, as sundry Muppets searches have been over the past few months; like I wrote at the end of that Alex Carter post, the image in my Thanksgiving 2009 entry “Board Now” gets hits from variations on strings like {cecilia venn diagram} and the more generic {how i met your mother funny}, to name the two most common variations (mutually exclusive in wording, strangely enough).

Google seems to be the top feeder to this blog by far — at least in terms of arrival here from links on other sites. If you type the blog’s address directly into your browser or you’ve bookmarked it, that’s another story (and, fear not, something that isn’t tracked, as the most specific the Stats get are Pageviews by Countries, Operating Systems, and Browsers). Seven of the ten Referring Sites in the All Time view of my Traffic Sources are incarnations of Google (US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Brazil, and France, in order), with both Yahoo Image Search and Microsoft’s Bing trumped by the only entry that isn’t a search engine, the aggregation blog Update-a-Tron. I should be very happy to get such constant traffic from Update-a-Tron, which offers feed excerpts of the latest posts from various comics-oriented blogs, since I don’t write about comics here as often as I would like to — barely at all, of late, although it’s neck-and-neck with television overall in terms of post subjects. Whether the proprietor got wind of Blam’s Blog during a patch of relevant posts or I was grandfathered in because of past enterprises I have no idea. Of course I’m also thankful for the links on blogs and other sites run by friends, acquaintances, et al.

I leave you with a handful of particularly odd search terms that have popped up in my Stats — odd either in and of themselves or simply because there’s no readily apparent reason for them to lead to my blog.

{intellectual beatles}

{fencing lame jokes}

{batman irony}

{fat dc comics robin}

{comic script of moral responsibility}

{feminine discipline}

{peewee herman hands}

I certainly don’t want to go looking that last one up, given the circumstances of Paul Reubens’ arrest in an, um, adult cinema several years back. As for the others, well, I made selections from my ever-growing list of choice searches that didn’t turn up anything particularly interesting when I recreated the searches myself, yet about which I didn’t have much to say. I plan to share more searches down the line that do beg commentary.

What’s the weirdest search string you’ve seen?


Related: Joker Lice • Carter Beats the Google • Imperceptible Sally