Wednesday 28 August 2013

More Search Madness - Strange Searches Redux

A data visualization of Wikipedia as part of t...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Occasionally I post some of the stranger searches to have landed in these dusty little rooms somewhere at the end of a long, dark corridor in a little-visited subterranean complex somewhere to the west of the Internet.

This harmless pastime is enabled by Sitemeter, a little widget that lets me know you have searched the World Wide Web for Cobblers in Satwa and ended up here as a result. This in itself wouldn't be interesting or strange if you weren't based in Helsinki, googling like a mad thing from the offices of Cargotech Corporation on your WindowsNT Macintosh. Why in heaven's name would anyone in Helsinki want to know about cobblers in Satwa? I've just come back from there, there are perfectly good shoe repair places in Helsinki!

Mind you, anyone using Safari when they've got both Firefox and Chrome installed on their desktop is a worry.

I'm very pleased that three to five-odd searches a day are landing on this post, which tells of how you can turn off the otherwise highly obtrusive Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook touchpad. It was a huge issue for me when I first got the machine and appears to have been blighting others all over the planet. It's easy to fix when you know how - the problem is Samsung won't tell you how. Similarly, a couple of searches a day are landing on this analysis of quite what's in Tim Horton's French Vanilla coffee and that's just as much a public service (the answer boiling down to no vanilla and a lot of ugly goo). And the ingredients of Pringles, tappiness of Aquafina, vileness of chicken rib meat and other food posts are perennially popular.

I should do more of them, actually - the fact that one person found the Pringles post by searching 'Pringles chip lips numb' is something of a concern - I hope they feel better now. Oh, I forgot to mention the post that details what egregious gleet is pumped into Subway's '9 grain wheat' bread. That's always good for a few ews.

Thanks to another nifty technology I use called Zemanta, someone landed here having searched Google images for 'Shaved West Highland Terriers', which is something of a worry. I've never actually posted about shaved Westies, you'll be pleased to know. Zemanta is responsible for the pictures I use to illustrate posts - it contextually suggests images (and links, but I don't use that) for posts derived from copyright free sources. One quirk of the system is that where I have more search 'grunt' than the original image location, people get to the image linked to this blog before they get to the image owner's site or Flickr or whatever. And I used a picture of a Westie to illustrate this here post about Nokia maps and the evolution of PC based mapping in general. I didn't know it was shaved, though. Honest.

Someone from Romania (working at Romania Data Systems, actually) googled nmkl pjkl ftmch for some reason best known to themselves and instead got a silly 'Shiny' post, for which I suppose I should apologise. I wonder if it's Romanian for something? Or is there an underground Young Ones fan scene developing there?

I am delighted to find myself a world authority on how to pronounce GITEX, but am baffled as to why anyone in Turkey should google 'Alexander McNabb Shemlan' - the blasted book's not even out yet!

I would appear to 'own' the search phrase 'rage Indian' which I think is odd. And I do get a grin every time someone googles something like 'what does "what to do yani" mean?', leading them invariably to this old but eternally popular post and leading me to think of someone else who's just been right royally shafted.

You can generally find your way here by appending the word 'fake' to any number of permutations, as the person who searched Yahoo! for 'Fake Boobbies' found out. And, in retrospect, I shouldn't have titled a post about Simian maniac George W Bush visitng Dubai 'Bush tickled' and apologise to the person who searched for that phrase and was so clearly disappointed. Similarly, the person googling 'best Philippine hooker bar in Dubai' must have felt suitably bilked to arrive here at this rant about the Observer's lazy piece on fleshpot Dubai.

And, finally, a raise of the glass to the most excellent individual who searched The Internet for 'Death To Modhesh'. I can only hope they found what they were looking for...

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2 comments:

Lara said...

Hi Alexander,

Hope all is well.

I would like to have your email address as I would like to share with you a project I'm working on.

Thanks,

Lara

Alexander said...

Hi Lara - it's my first name at myfirstnameandlastname dot com. Nice and easy! Or @alexandermcnabb on Twitter!

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