You've been Googled! 


One of the interesting things about having your own web site (even one that you don't update very often—sorry about that!) is that at some point, it will get indexed by the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and so on. This means that you get all kinds of people visiting your site looking for all kinds of content (and very welcome they are too), but it never ceases to amaze me both what people search for, and how they manage to end up here of all places… 

For example, the most common searches that lead people to my site currently involve either Bertrand Russell (whom I have entries containing a picture of and essay regarding, respectively), Plato (particularly on the subject of happiness and the structure of the soul, both of which posted essays about) and—somewhat more bizarrely—‘wicky woo’, which was a term coined by my friend George Wright to describe the sensation of loss that you feel when, having decided to have a cup of tea, you inexplicably change your mind and turn the kettle off. It turns out that Wicky Woo is also the title of a popular arcade game, and I can only assume that people searching for the game either end up here by mistake or are intrigued by the concept of the Blogtionary.

When I started compiling the Blogtionary (which, in the style of The Meaning of Liff or Douglas Coupland's Generation X, contains humorous definitions for things that don't otherwise appear to have a name) I didn't expect it to generate a great number of hits, mainly because most of the words were made up, such as kafloop or lubbocks. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to discover just how many people search for terms like absentism, dessertification and shoulder nipples, some of which I believed myself—wrongly, as it turns out—to have made up (although in the former cases, these could be attributed to misspellings of absenteeism and desertification, which are both real words).

I get quite a few people searching for beard-related content, and even received one comment from a complete stranger that I should grow mine back because there aren't enough red beards in the world—thanks S Otlowski! However, I don't know whether to be shocked, flattered or just plain embarrassed, both by people searching for "Keith Wilson masturbation" and the fact that they ended up on my site as a result! I mean, it's not like I claim to have invented some special technique or anything (although God knows I've tried. ;-)

As you might expect, referrals tend to vary according to the content I've most recently posted to the site, and articles on iPods, Apple's Mac OS X Tiger and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film have all been popular at one time or another. The level of traffic is also incredibly sensitive to Google's search rankings, which at one point seemed to have decided that I was an authoritative sources of information on the political composition of the British Isles due to a semi-humorous rant that I posted about people saying England when they mean Britain, and vice versa. I suspect that the recent increase in traffic (from around 10 to over 40 visitors per day) is due to the public beta of Google's blog search facility, which seems to have given a welcome boost to my viewing figures.

In any case, I just wanted to reflect in a vague, waffly sort of way (as my university philosophy supervisor would say) on the marvellousness of the internet, modern search engines, and the power of information as it becomes more connected and available to individuals around the planet. Hello to you all, and thanks for dropping by to check out my web site. I hope you find something to amuse, interest or otherwise arouse your intellectual faculties—vive la différence! (And if you'd like to check out who else has been visiting my web site lately, click on the little planet icon on the right hand side of this page…) 

Posted on Sunday - November 06, 2005 at 06:48 PM            

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