Turned stones
If you have a website, you probably have a look at traffic logs and things every so often. I certainly do, because it allows me to find out just how utterly unimportant my web-ness is in the wider internet. Yay narcissism!
It also provides useful information, like the fact that 0.16% of visitor traffic in July has come from the Seychelles. That'll help me adjust my marketing strategies to maximise click-throughs. Or something.
Now the interesting bit: I know that this site is indexed by at least Google and MSN Search, but the stats show that not many people come here from search engines. So it's quite entertaining to look through the search phrases in the referers to see what that minority were looking for and whether there's a chance that they found it here...
The one that caught my eye today was a search for "pictures children playing".
The picture it found was naturally this one, which does indeed show children playing. I spent a while with Google trying to find out where my link appears in the results list, and clicked through 20-odd pages of search results with no joy. You'd have to really want to find a picture of children playing to go that far... oh. It appears my happy website has become a haven for sinister child-fanciers! (And I'll be branded too for doing all that searching...)
(It turned out that the search actually came from Yahoo, where that picture currently shows up on the second page of results. So it was probably a nice old lady wanting to illustrate the parish magazine after all. Phew.)
A handful of other fun things also came to light:
Yahoo seems to prefer indexing the print versions of these pages, but I'd prefer it to index the
nice normal versions since they're easier to navigate. I suspect a bit of fiddling with Apache mod-rewrite will fix this.
Searching for "pictures children playing" turned up an excellent rant by confused fundamentalists
about the dangers of Pokemon and Magic cards.
"What if they carry their favorite monsters like magical charms or fetishes in their pockets, trusting them to bring power in times of need?"
Oh for goodness' sake.
This one is good too. Environmentally-conscious kids are obviously pagan earth-worshippers.
Finally, someone searched for "something pleasing" and ended up here. How sweet. I hope they found it...