Have you played Apples to Apples before? The goal is to win cards, and each card features a single adjective. After the end of the game, it’s fun to read out loud all of one’s cards with the fun conceit that together the cards that you’ve collected describe you as a person—i.e. “dazzling,” “rich,” “pretty,” “wretched” and “stinky.”
Here I’ve decided to find out what kind of person I am by examining how people discover my blog. Most people come to my blog directly—typically because they’ve “favorited” it—but some people stumble on the blog through a web search using a search engine. One of the fancy capabilities my blog offers is the ability to discover the word searches that people use to find my blog.
I thought that in the spirit of Apples to Apples it might be fun to look back over the two years I’ve activated this feature on my blog to see how people discover me (or my blog). If my blog reflects in part who I am, it might be interesting to find out what kinds of words people use to discover my blog. (And only now can I truly find self-understanding. Had Socrates only had a search engine, he could have done away with all those pesky face-to-face dialogues.)
Hundreds, and probably thousands, of people have come to my blog via a web engine search on a variant of “eyeball.” Most common among these searches are “eyeball pics” and “eyeball photos.” No surprise there. But that doesn’t exhaust the list. Folks have stumbled onto my blog in pursuit of, among many other searches, “evil eyeballs,” “eyeball burn,” “weedwhacking eyeball,” “vegetable eyeballs,” “pig eyeball,” “eyeball chair” and “magical eyeball pictures.” I like that, and I can get behind these searches.
After eyeballs and its variations, the most common way people found my blog is not, as you might have guessed, with searches for hands or bees.
No. That would be lovely were it so.
Instead it by searching for “extenze,” the, ahem, “revolutionary herbal pill” that leads to “all natural enhancement.” Folks have discovered my blog with these words searches (among many others): “extenze photos,” “extenze results photos,” and “extenze before and after photos.” Search engines direct the extenze-curious to my blog because the spirit of my blog is so expansive it naturally adds size to its viewers. Either that or because I once posted this:
http://professormikey.blogspot.com/2009/06/extenze.html. If you are thinking there might be a third (unmentioned) reason that my blog is associated with extenze, you’d be wrong.
Spectacularly wrong.
Once one gets past eyeballs and extenze, viewers’ word searches cover a remarkable range of moods. Mostly ranging from sad to sadder. Certainly death is a good way to find my blog, and in particular if you search for dead roses as lots of people apparently do. (By the way, I leave all the word searches just as they were written; I don’t correct spelling or grammar.) Here are some searches that apparently just scream out my blog.
“Dead rose photos”
“Dead rose pics”
“rose stems died”
“Dead rose pictures”
“Dead rose stems”
But looking for dead pigs will also land you to my blog:
“dead pig photo”
“photo of dead pig in water”
“pictures of dead pigs”
I don’t know whether “waterfall pig” is living or dead, but I suspect it is dead.
There is a disturbing amount of interest out there in decapitation, and virtually anyone searching for it ends up at my blog. I will spare you the worst (and most disturbing) searches. But these certainly give you a flavor:
“She is partially decapitated”
“decapitated head pics”
My blog is apparently a home for those who are crushed with anguish:
“Hand holding family no match for tornado”
It’s a safe haven for the pessimistic:
“All things solid melt into thin air”
“and then I thought this: the robots will definitely win”
And it opens its arms to the bleak:
“art is too long and life is too short”
And to the paranoid:
“attack of the fly”
And to the defensive:
“unusually small feet”
“shoot blanks”
“I photograph because I can’t paint”
There’s no getting around it. I’m a hero to creepy types:
“underneath the bathtub scratching”
“Where’s me stone”
“bleached skull”
“blood red balloons”
“cannibalism safe”
“chefs feet”
“the crystal skeleton”
“feet for a man”
“placenta images art”
“photos of sad 8 year old”
Some searches I can’t help but take personally:
“middlebrow art”
“tyrannized”
“recover mojo”
“sissy boy photos”
“grand central weirdo”
“Calvinism symbolism and photographs”
Apparently if you are searching for the unclassifiable or the ineffable, search engines direct you automatically to my blog:
“Camera in mouth”
“Petticoat Duel”
“barbershop reggae”
“less pain and Freud”
“vitruvian girl”
“cool dolls”
“clever water”
“vegetable pumpkin carriage creation”
“Michelangelo Buddha”
Michelle Pfeiffer Suntrust Bank Acount”
One word search was a pill of bitter irony for me:
“zucchini powder”
Oh, evil web searcher, you may have found me this time, but you are henceforth and forever banned from my site.
The following welcome visitor, in contrast, may not quite understand grammar properly, but he or she expresses something quite truthfully and profoundly:
“here comes the sun james taylor ruined”
I think the following person found my blog by mistake. Justcurious, in contrast, would surely say that this searcher found the perfect site:
“nobody puts baby in the corner pictures”
And to sum it all up, this woman (surely it was a very attractive woman) thought of me in this way:
“stud dude”
Natch.
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