Searches that find the blog

As you know, we use "SiteMeter" to count the visits to our blog. (The count is now at 15,759 and counting -- who'd have guessed that, two years ago? The counts vary wildly, but typically we get 20 to 30 visits a day and, on busy days, as many as 250 page views.)

But SiteMeter doesn't just count. It also keeps track of all kinds of other information. The info is visible, apparently, only to me, since I set up the account. Our version -- the free one -- tracks information about the most recent 100 visits, such as date, time, number of page views, the visitor's domain name, and entry and exit pages. We could buy a paid subscription that would track the last 4000 visits, instead of just 100, and would provide much more detail about each visit. Someday, I just might. But meanwhile, one fun item is a world map that shows the domain name location for the most recent 100 visitors. Here's a map from this morning:


This one isn't the most thrilling since, as you can see, our most recent visitors have all been from North America, but it's not unusual at all to see visits from Australia or New Zealand, Africa, Europe -- all over the place. Amazing!

In some cases, though not always, SiteMeter also reports a visitor's referring URL -- that is, the page that sent the visitor to the blog. When a visitor gets to the blog through a search engine, SiteMeter also shows the search that the visitor used to find us. And THAT'S really interesting. For a while now I've been keeping track of these searches. Sometimes, the search itself will give you pretty good clues as to who the searcher must have been. People who've been mentioned on the blog for one reason or another get here sometimes by Googling themselves, for instance -- or perhaps being Googled by a friend or relation. Once in a while the searcher's identity is unmistakable. For instance, a few weeks ago, a searcher in Kenya found us by running a Google search for a string of words something like this: "Luke Laura Earlville Murphy blog." Hi, Jessie!

Other times the link is much more mysterious. Why, for instance, did somebody in Ohio run a Google search for "prine ali ababwa" ? And even more mysterious at first glance, why on earth would such a search have led to this blog? We'll never know the searcher's reason for running the search, but here's the reason that the search turned up this blog, along with two other sites: the infamous song lyrics comment string.

Here are some of the other searches that have led to this blog in the past month or two:

Blogsearch: Klaus climate

Blogsearch: Vaclau Klaus

Search.naver.com (Korea) : When the frost is on the punkin

Blogsearch: Minnesota vet school interview

Google: "Sir Mort Clark" January 23

Google (Tanzania) : swahil merchant of venice plot

Here's my all-time favorite, from some hopeful dreamer whose location I didn't note:

Search.com : "the one" love at first sight..descriptions..does it exist

And far and away the most common are searches along the lines of these:

Google (New Zealand) : Albie the Racist Dragon

Google (Arizona) : Lyrics Albie the Racist Dragon

Blogsearch (Columbus, Ohio) : Albanian boy and racist dragon

Google (London) : The Albanian Racist Dragon

(Do you begin to detect a pattern??)

Fun, huh? I'll post more of these as they appear.