McNabb, Illinois Is A Thing. I Am Institutionalised. Only Not How I Thought I Would Be...

Somewhere in deepest Illinois, sort of left of Chicago, there is a village of some 280 souls (down from 300, apparently) called McNabb. I have to confess, I do love their water tank. They even have a website. It's mostly concerned with sewage and stuff, which seems about right.

I'll go there one of the days, you mark my words. I'll probably be wearing a 'Hello, Illinois, my name is McNabb' t-shirt. There's a much slighter chance I'll go incognito.

It's nestled deep in a huge patchwork quilt of squared-off fields and right angled roads. On Google Earth it looks flat and dull and utterly boring. I hope to God it's not. I hope it's a mad and nutty place filled with joy and carousing, anarchy bubbling under and a constant middle finger raised to the world around, most of which seems to consist of squares of ploughed tillage.

Don't even ask me how I found it. I don't even know myself. But I now have a new Twitter icon which I am deeply delighted with. And if ever there were a place to open 'McNabb Books', this would be The One...

Strange Searches Ride Again

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Search engines are funny things. There they are, making billions of dollars out of giving you what you're looking for on the Internet and here I am, clearly screwing up that process for a small but frustrated number of searchers.

Sure enough, some people get what they're looking for - and there is a constant stream of people finding out what's in Tim Horton's deeply egregious French Vanilla coffee as well as crappy, additive-packed products like Pringles, Aquafina, Big Mac Chicken Nuggets and their (mostly really gross) ilk.

And there are quite a number who find their sojourn here truly useful, believe it or not. I know, I know, I'm amazed myself. But thousands have landed here and found, for instance, the secret to how to switch off the trackpad on a Samsung S5 Ultrabook - I am truly glad to have helped so very many of my fellow sufferers. And many searchers for Sri Lankan gems have found my 'buyer beware' post, which is a good thing, I would submit.

But others haven't been so lucky...

Here follows a compilation of some of the stranger recent visitors to this dusty and neglected backwater of the Internet.

Subsy onche emarat
You never know, you might win a game of 'Internet Era Trivial Pursuit' with this. Nokia's head office in Finland enjoys the IP address 131.228.29.81. Which is how I know that the person searching the World Wide Web for 'subsy onche emarat' works for Nokia. Other than that, and the fact this blog is the second Google result for the phrase, I am utterly baffled. What on earth was he/she looking for?

Food adultery
This one seemed funny until I found the post the searcher found and, clearly finding it amusing at the time, I had actually headlined it 'food adultery'.

Tent Grand Hyatt Dubai octoberfest shirt
It's an oddly specific search string, isn't it? It gets you this here post from a search on Bing, sadly not the first result. However, I had totally forgotten the post and it brought back memories of an ancient - and glorious - promotional fail.

tim hortons french vanilla ingredients
*little first page win dance*

mkene fishermen in  lotoboka
It's not that someone searched Bing for this odd - inexplicable even - phrase. It's not even that they landed on the blog by searching for it. It's that when I repeat the search, Bing or Google, it returns no results. SO HOW DID THEY GET HERE? Doodeedoodoo doodeedoodoo...

faking girl sudani dubai uae
Look, I don't mean to be rude, but if you can't spell it, I don't think you should be allowed to do it. The charmer searching for this got to this post, which I am glad to say was no help whatsoever to him, but did amuse me greatly as I had forgotten it.

paper,printer,ink to print fake money
I love this one. The putative commencement of an international criminal's career, cut short not by enforcement agencies acting on his/her clearly larcenous search history but by said criminal finding instead of the clear instructions he/she sought, this blog. How that happened, I do now know, because searching the first ten pages of results on Bing, I couldn't find the offending post myself!

best way to stop my etisalat frm consuming so much dataplan in a very little time
Clearly an unhappy customer. The answer, of course, is turn off data on your mobile. You're unlikely to find any answers here, of course...

dubai faking girls sex pics
This delightful person a) can't spell and b) works for (or has access to the network at) Lutheran General Health Systems in Chicago, Illinois. The visit came from 168.235.196.136, see. Not very Lutheran as searches go, is it? 

How To Drool A Frog - More Weird And Wacky Searches

(Photo credit: thms.nl)

I occasionally dip into Sitemeter, the natty little analytics widget I don't use very much, to see what people have been searching to land themselves on this mouldy sub-corner of the Interwebs. I took such a dip today because I couldn't really get into the swing of writing for a while and decided to play a bit until the fancy once more took me to recommence my story of The Simple Irish Farmer, which is my WIP of choice.

I found that not a few people are clearly concerned about whether or not they put plastic in Subway bread - in fact thousands of them have Googled the topic and found themselves reading my take on the whole thing - their searches for truth leading them here. I find it very odd that a silly little blog like this can not only rank so high in search, but draw so many searchers for both this and the Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee is junk post. I am similarly pleased to say I have offered succour to thousands of punters who have been tearing their hair out at Chuck Norris the Trackpad on their Samsung S5 Ultrabooks.

Similarly, Sri Lanka Gems is a popular search term - and to my mild shock, my post about the gem and spice sales scams of Sri Lanka is number six result on Google. In the world. I mean, how mad is that? "Gemstones Sri Lanka" gets the same result, which I guess has Klout running around saying I'm influential about gemstones. A subject about which - I hasten to add - I am pretty much utterly bereft of knowledge let alone authority. A similar mind-boggling search anomaly is to be found in the phrase, "where did Nokia go wrong" which features this post on the first page of search results. And that's bonkers. Truly.

Somebody in Pakistan searched the Interwebs for the interesting-sounding "picrs sixi porn salik 17 21" which just led him here, which I am willing to wager a considerable sum was not the result he had in mind. Or even she, come to think of it. Apparently, online onanistic fortune favours the literate. And another rube got here by Googling "marage night fack movie". Were they after a fake movie or a fu... oh, never mind...

Search "online onanistic fortune". It's mine, all mine, precioussss...

Someone else was looking for a cartoon character curry - searching for "tom and jerry masalas", presumably to accompany a nice Daffy Duck Dosa. The searcher, rather worryingly based at Nokia's corporate headquarters over in Finland, got here instead. I say rather worryingly because you'd think they'd have a future to concern themselves about rather than playing about on Google looking for silly curries.

Another person arrived at La Blog by Googling "salmon farming in saudi arabia".

It's Yemen, dunce.

Then there are the surreal. I mean what did you think you'd get when you slammed "www.indianheroinafack blogspat.com" into Google? Blogspat. Love it. Interestingly, the 'perp' works for the Miller Brewing Company in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was using a crappy old Nokia 5.0 browser. They got this for their troubles...

My favourite of this particular batch was the search term 'How to drool a frog' which really makes the mind boggle just a tad, but led its searcher to this post about HSBC's drooling incompetence. Which wasn't, I'm sure, what they were after. And no thank you, I don't want to know what they were actually looking for...

Any of them, come to think of it.

Fakhr El-Din Restaurant Amman - The Update

It's a fascinating exercise in SEO wot I posted about earlier today. Amman's classiest and tastiest (IMHO) Arabic restaurant, Fakhreddine, has long caused major search-derived traffic hereabouts because, in fact, the restaurant is properly called 'Fakhr El-Din'. and its 'proper' website is http://fakhreldin.com/. The restaurant, part of the ATICO group, has had to face standardising the English version of an Arabic name - so you could call it Fakhr El Din or Fakhr Eddine or Fakhr El-Din or Fakhreddine (the popular spelling at the time I first blogged about the restaurant) or any other combination of names.

The conundrum is which spelling you plump for - and which misspellings you include in your SEO efforts. The most popular (as I say, at the time, 'Fakhreddine' was the 'defacto' name of the restaurant in English) ones can be easily hijacked or cause frustration, so the trick is working out what they are and re-routing them to your 'real' spelling.

Arabic is wicked like that. Are you Ali Alhashemi, Ali Al-Hashemi or Ali Al Hashemi? Perhaps Ali Hashemi? All four are essential SEO targets. What's more, it gets even more complex as you 'drill down' into search.

But for now, let us consider Fakhr El Din to be the name to click on. It's a GREAT restaurant. The Fat Expat review says it all, really: It's linked here!