Strange Searches

Image via WikipediaEvery now and then I take a peep at Sitemeter to dredge up some of the stranger search terms that have landed people with a moist 'plop' in the middle of this soft, bloggy piece of ground.

Search fascinates me, and not just because it's becoming an evermore important part of the old day job. It's the little wrinkles in search I find amusing - and not the least of these is the way in which 'do no evil' Google prioritises search for its own products - a Blogger blog gets way better results than other platforms on Google, but less so in Bing, for instance.

By the way, give this a try: http://www.duckduckgo.com - it's an alternative search engine I got turned onto after reading a post on Narain Jashanmal's blog on how he's managed to go Google free.

Because of the Google Treatment, I sometimes find this potty little blog hits way above its weight in search. In a few instances, I'm very glad indeed - many thousands of people have read my posts on what's inside Pringles, Subway's 'wholemeal' bread and Aquafina water, and that's pretty much down to search.

So here are a few recent 'oddities'...

how much is a 1 gb data from etisalat  
Dhs 249 per month, mate. No problem, a pleasure.

what is the use of emirates id
When you find out, dear searcher, please do drop me a comment and let me know...

is food labelled in the emirates
For some reason I imagined this searcher, from Norway, is thinking about exporting his moose paté to new markets and has a very long way to go indeed before he 'gets' the UAE market...

how to pronounce gitex
This search led to this here post where I carefully, albeit with a mildly worrying obsessiveness, show readers how to pronounce GITEX. It's JEE TECKS by the way.

cows aorta
It is a source of some pride to me (surely there's some sort of badge you should get for this) that in all the world's Internet, thanks to this here post about the Dubai Sustainable Transport Award, I 'own' this phrase. Yes, folks, out of 174,000 possible search results, Google thinks I'm the most relevant of the lot. And they are terribly, tragically wrong...

subway bread plastic
This is one of those posts that has been read by many people. Again, it qualifies for a Tufty Club badge, because it's number one in search. If you want to know why Subway's wholemeal bread contains rice, caramel and an ingredient that would have you imprisoned for 15 years if you used it in Singapore, you too can click on this here link.

Is it any wonder people have it in for bankers?
I'm not sure what's more wonderful - the fact someone googled this phrase or the fact it led them to li'l ole me and this post about why I hate my bank - its call centre in particular.

dorothy miles choueifat
I try and post reminiscence posts as scarcely as possible, but the past sneaked into this one about using Nokia Maps. We'd decided to name the GPS NufNuf after Dorothy Miles' dog (she was the director of the International School of Choueifat, Sharjah) so now if you googles dotters, you get this slice of total irrelevance.

Pringles Controversy
Third search result - it's amazing how powerful consumer voice can be on the internet - I mean, this is hardly the Huffington Post, is it? It's an out of the way backwater blog by somebody of no particular interest to the vast majority of people. This search leads to this post about what they actually make Pringles out of (Don't click! Don't click!). But it doesn't take you to Pringles. Oh no...

Schematic Bicycle
This is an interesting one. It's an image search hit - I use a smart doohicky called Zemanta which searches for copyright free images based on the context of posts and lets you paste these into your post (it also does some other clever stuff around tags and links). So I linked to this Wikipedia image for this here post about why I hate my bank's awful radio ads and now on image search I 'own' the image and searches come to me. I don't know how or why this works, but hundreds of people looking for the Book of Kells have been bored by my views on publishing instead. Similarly this search for 'IBM minicomputer' gives very high ranking to this blog rather than the original image (linked in the post) to IBM's actual archives. Image search is, I guess, just that much harder to figure out!

World’s Worst Web
This is actually fair do's - I'd assert that some of the sites in this post would be global worst practice contenders...