{"id":104,"date":"2008-03-08T12:59:02","date_gmt":"2008-03-08T18:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=104"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:01:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:01:00","slug":"seek-and-ye-shall-findsomething-irrelevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/seek-and-ye-shall-findsomething-irrelevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Seek And Ye Shall Find…Something Irrelevant"},"content":{"rendered":"

And you thought I made this stuff up…\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 A couple of posts ago I was bemoaning spam comments<\/a> being posted to this blog, and posited a scenario where people were looking for videos of dwarves blowing\u00c2\u00a0goats and found my site by mistake.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, sure enough, it’s happened.<\/p>\n

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)\u00c2\u00a0Yahoo (2%), or one of the other search engines (also 2%).\u00c2\u00a0 And one of the recent visitors was indeed\u00c2\u00a0searching for “dwarf porno”.\u00c2\u00a0 Really.\u00c2\u00a0 They must have been really disappointed to land on my diatribe against sick perverts.\u00c2\u00a0 Serves them right.\u00c2\u00a0 I hope they lost their hard-on.<\/p>\n

Now, a\u00c2\u00a0lot 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<\/span> results, I wouldn’t pay a thing for it.<\/p>\n

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).\u00c2\u00a0 The search engines drive them to Interrobang (\u00e2\u20ac\u00bd<\/span>)<\/em> because I posted an article with a title of “The Seven Swear Words of Successful Managers<\/a>“, which I thought was a clever play on the book The Seven\u00c2\u00a0Habits of Successful Managers<\/em> and George Carlin’s “seven swear words you can’t say on television” routine.\u00c2\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

I also titled a post “Black Boys On Mopeds<\/a>“.\u00c2\u00a0 This was an article about my dislike of the violence in England and justification for me expatriating.\u00c2\u00a0 The title is a Sinead O’Connor song.\u00c2\u00a0 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”.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And they won’t find the answer here.\u00c2\u00a0 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\u00c2\u00a0the 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.\u00c2\u00a0 So now you know.<\/p>\n

Another popular destination for search engines is an article I wrote on the Verve’s legal woes<\/a> over their song Bittersweet Symphony.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Ditto an article I wrote on AT&T’s appalling Uverse service<\/a> – the more people get to hear about this the better.<\/p>\n

But these rare exceptions aside, the search engines are directing people to my site for no good reason whatsoever.\u00c2\u00a0 Another popular search term is “polish swear words” (a testament to the racial intolerance prevalent in Britain, where many Poles have migrated).\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t have anything on my site about Polish swear words.\u00c2\u00a0 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”,\u00c2\u00a0and even “goat” (unless you like the thought of a dwarf blowing one…).<\/p>\n

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).\u00c2\u00a0 Search engines will rank pages higher if the page title itself contains the search term.\u00c2\u00a0 But most of my article titles are (deliberately) obtuse, or have\u00c2\u00a0at best a tangential\u00c2\u00a0reference to the article\u00c2\u00a0 It’s all\u00c2\u00a0part of the reader’s fun, trying to work it out.\u00c2\u00a0 Or not.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe it’s just me who thinks about this stuff, and I’m just being too clever for the search engines.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe to save searchers’ time, I should just dumb it all down and call these articles something literal.\u00c2\u00a0 Like naming this one “Search engines don’t work”.\u00c2\u00a0 But where’s the fun in that?\u00c2\u00a0 Alternatively, I could just be happy at the increased hit count, and title everything “Online gambling” or “Free sex videos”.\u00c2\u00a0 That seems to be pretty much all the Internet is used for, anyway…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And you thought I made this stuff up…\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 A couple of posts ago I was bemoaning spam comments being posted to this blog, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}