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.

More Search Madness - Strange Searches Redux

(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...

Strange Searches

Strange (Photo credit: KellBailey)

It's been a while since I last did this. Every now and then I amuse myself by taking a look at some of the search phrases that have brought people to this dusty corner of the interwebs. Along with the usual round of sensible landings there are always some oddities.

This harmless activity is made possible by a little doohickey called SiteMeter, which gives deeper metrics than Google Analytics. If anyone thought they were truly anonymous on the Internet, a few minutes with SiteMeter usually puts them right - I know your IP, your landing page, your leaving page, where you came from to get here, your OS and lots of other stuff.

So behave and wipe your feet next time.

Anyway. Strange searches.

Nude men wearing plastic macs 
This was a strong start. Quite why they landed here I don't know. But I can only imagine their disappointment must have been a joy to see. Equally, I can't tell how someone landed here from Bing having searched, worryingly, for "watertank sensory deprivation experiment"!!!

Fake droopy nuts 
Quite a lot of 'fake' searches lead here, but this one could hardly have expected a blog post about brainstorming a coated nut brand. The party must have been a hoot when Lou finally got his hands on that little speciality joke item.

Lick an ax murderer from crawley 
The post was a howl of rage at HSBC's famously woeful call centre, but you can only hope that someone wanted to find the article again and found that phrase more memorable than the blog's name. Because if that wasn't the case, there's someone out there who wants to lick axe murderers from Crawley. And that's pretty strange, if you ask me.

Download alexander mcnabb 
Most people I know go to considerable effort to avoid me, which can be difficult at times, I agree. As for downloading me, I haven't uploaded yet, so you'll have to wait...

Why people go mad in UAE during the national day 
Why, indeed? I have frequently commented that this is the only place in the Middle East in the last three years where the people have taken to the streets - in support of the government and nation.

Literary agents of Dubai 
elf publishing in emirates 
Both of these searches are doomed to failure - because there are as many literary agents in Dubai as there are elves in the UAE publishing industry.

louisbouiton fake shoes dubai souks 
There's nothing like someone who can't spell the brand they're looking for knock-off copies of, is there? In this case, a search for hooky Louboutins gets you this here post.

i hate pr 
You wouldn't believe how much empathy I feel for this searcher in his/her moment of Googly angst.

make fake nol card 
This is one of a number of searches that land on the blog with clearly criminal intent in mind. One is shocked, shocked I tell you. Another recent search was 'discreet bars in Dubai'!!!

Cow's aorta
I am pleased to be able to tell you that I rank numero uno for this search phrase. It's a funny world, people...

PS
Dirigible Repair Specialist
As Mr Goat points out in the comments, a search for "Digible Repair Specialist" gets you to this post. I have to report, sadly, I am not aware of any search for this string actually landing someone on the blog. One day I might land a slightly puzzled steampunk author, you never know...

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...

Strange Searches

Image via WikipediaI occasionally dip into SiteMeter to take a look at what brings people here and the results are always wildly unpredictable. Sometimes people search for mad things or things that are completely at odds with the content here but which happen because of some odd pairing of words. Sometimes people look for the oddest of things. And sometimes the arcane laws of Google and SEO mean that people actually find what they're looking for here, rather than in the 'right' place. The titles are linked to the pages you gets with the searches...

Fake Plastic Whore Face
This little joy from Google Germany leads to a post about one of those Dubai bashing articles, so the lone pervert bashing away at his (her?) keyboard in search of odd things got rather bilked by this search. I wonder what it is?

Negative reaktion crédit agricole green banking
I'm quite proud of this one, because all sorts of searches like "crédit agricole green banking", "credit agricole greenwashing connery" and, in fact, 'Negative reaction crédit agricole green banking" get a first page result and so lots and lots of people have dropped by to see what the fuss was all about. The Times sums it all up quite nicely here. The ads, as egregious a piece of greenwashing as you could want to see, don't run any more, but I frequently use them in workshops and the like as the perfect greenwashing example. Oh, and those hotel towel washing notices, too...

Tantalise your tastebuds
This is Google irony at its finest.  In posting a rant about this most irritating phrase used in hotel radio advertising, I have now ensured that I own the damn thing on Google. I'm obviously happier about owning "nmkl pjkl ftmch"...

mish mushkila ya habibi meaning
It's always amused me wildly that the most popular thing I've written in something like three years of bloggery was the silly post about 'Ten Word Arabic', which posited that there are only ten words you really need to know in order to survive in the Arab World. Apart from being picked up by a big US blog (which saw a huge and wholly transient spike in readers) it has consistently led to people landing here whenever they search "Arabic Akid" or "what does arabic mushkila mean"? (It means you're screwed, pally). So I suppose it at least does some good...

what is mineralised water
It rather surprises me that this silly little blog in the middle of nowhere is the second search result for this phrase, but all sorts of search phrases such as "Aquafina TDS" lead to here, which is another great source of pride for me as my post explores the fact that Aquafina is tap water that is filtered and then re-mineralised with a mix supplied by Pepsi, something that few people appear to know and which the water's branding conveniently avoids.


social media tart
Another slice of Google irony - in giving myself this label I have now thoroughly conferred it upon myself - this here blog is number two search result for the phrase. I'm a little less certain about wanting ownership of the honorific these days... :)

Probability of sharks at hamra beach at ras al khaimah
I wonder if this was someone wondering whether to go swimming or checking that he really did see what he thought he saw. Or maybe just someone with a creative take on probability theory...

Fake this, fake that
I get people landing here looking for all sorts of fakery, including fake plastic chicken, fake plastic trumpets, fake plastic pottery and so on and so on ad infinitum.  Never Fake Plastic Trees, for some reason...

Nipple souk
I am truly at a loss. IS there a nipple souk somewhere in the world, filled with stalls of tiny temptations? Or is it just a mildly dysfunctional fantasy? Only a search can tell...

Strange searches
Posting these strange searches has meant I now own this phrase too. Because Google gives blogs more SEO than I would (strange, but true) argue they deserve, top level text (ie blog post titles) tends to do really, really well in search. I consciously decide not to title posts for SEO preferring instead a title consistent with the content, but what I lose in SEO I gain in the collection of oddball searches that occasionally lighten my days...

Strange Searches

Image via Wikipedia

I like to take an occasional look at how people get here to this dusty little corner of the Internet – the results are almost always rewarding in some strange way. There are a number of perennial favourites - I still ‘own’ the immortal nmkl pjkl ftmch and this picture of a plastic chicken is still highly popular – as well as some new delights. And people searching for words like mafsoum, akid and mafi still land here, which is a giggle!



Souks
Keeping this blog going for years has finally paid off. If you Google souks, this moany little collection of near-daily offcuts is number seven search result in the world out of something a little over 400,000 results. Tada! I am now a recognised and leading authority on souks! I shall have a sheriff badge made.

Cow Aorta
If you’re looking for cow aortas, believe it or not, this is the world's number one place to find them thanks to the RTA’s slightly strange looking sustainability campaign trophy thingy.After that, you get about 98,000 scientific journals and things talking about real cow aortas.

Klazart Authonomy
It is amazing to me that anyone’s still interested in this! Gamer Vineet Balla, AKA Klazart, ‘gamed’ the Harper Collins authonomy website in early 2009 by inviting a horde of gamer buddies to vote his book to the top. This resulted in a great deal of authorial brouhaha at the time, but oddly someone, somewhere, is still interested in the incident. Someone also found this here fusty wee blog by searching ‘how to move to rank 1 on authonomy’. I wouldn’t bother, mate.


Someone else also found da blog by Googling 'Eva Bartholdy' which pulled me up short - she's  a character from my first book, spoof international thriller Space (which, incidentally, made it to the authonomy editor's desk and was part of the proof that the editor's desk thingy wasn't really worth it in the first place).

Womin fack animal
Somewhere in the world, a drooling pervert with acute dyslexia got this instead of what he was looking for. And I am glad.

fake indian driving license in Australia
Don't ask me. It lands on this.  I get a lot of fakes - fake cheque books, fake plastic coconuts, fake driving tests, fake numerologists, fake plastic tokens, fake soybean plants, fake windscreen cracks, fake Hiltis and fake camels. Fake camels really does boggle the mind...

people you know and trust are somewhat fake?
Part of the Great Fake Series, this one had a slightly sad and betrayed air to it. Luckily it lands on advice from me of no value whatsoever.


us food is crap
Number three search result in all the multiverse! I'm quite proud of that.  I'm equally proud that hundreds (if not thousands by now) have searched for the ingredients of, or directly for, Pringles and Aquafina - and got to my posts outlining quite how both of these mildly egregious products are manufactured.

Sexy Tweets
Okay, I wrote a post about how to Tweet Sexy.  I wonder if the Googler in question got what he/she really wanted?


nimble 80286
If you persist to the second page of search results you get this, but why anybody would want to search for a diet bread and a processor beats me.

Phillipa Fioretti
Through no fault of her own, people are starting to search for my writer friend Pip and landing here. This won't last as she is soon to be playing in much more stellar company - her first novel, The Book of Love, goes on sale in Australia on April 1 and, of course, I am hoping that it is going to sell like billy-o, thereby relegating her fleeting involvement in this shameful little blog to the millionth page of search results after all those glowing reviews by otherwise hard-bitten critics.

eeste
God alone knows what it is and in which esoteric language, but searching for 'eeste' gets you this post on ve middul eeste pee aar awordes, the title inspired of course by one Nigel Molesworth. Maybe it's the brilliant new name for Vegemite after they dumped iSnack 2.0...

To all of you who have been deceived into coming here because of the strangeness of SEO, I am sorry but there is nothing of much use to anyone here. To those of you that keep coming by for some mad reason of your own, thank you for your visit. Don't forget to wash the handbasin on your way out for the convenience of other guests.

SEO and Strange Searches

Image via CrunchBase

It's an odd fact of life that Blogger blogs have brilliant 'SEO', which has led to some odd rumples in the space time continuum. Every now and then I like to share a few of the stranger or more interesting searches that have popped people through a wormhole to this dusty little corner of the Web - I've included a few that I think are strange because I don't think I deserve the attention.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is a set of techniques that are used to attract the attention of search engines as they 'crawl' the Web looking for the right content to present to you when you search for something. Vagaries in SEO can mean that search engines put some interesting stuff at the top of the pile sometimes. For instance, to search for the glorious and famous Fakhreddine Restaurant in Amman and get me rambling can be something of a let down.

Strange searches (the phrase itself belongs to the blog - if you Google it, this is what you get) include batty or worrying things - for instance "www.anemal faking wamen", I don't think he meant impersonating, or the perennial "russian girl face slash" which I honestly wish I didn't 'own' as the first search result. Here are a few notes on recent searches that piqued my curiosity, just in case they pique yours!

how to fake incompetence
I'm not sure how to take this one, but a Google search of this phrase takes you straight to your number one incompetence fakery blog! I almost feel I should write a post to at least help those brilliant minds who are trying to disguise their talents under a bumbling, shambolic and useless exterior. Or perhaps just redirect them to HSBC, who are capable of doign a pretty good job of it - although I'm not entirely sure they're faking.

my city my metro
It's baffling, but with all the millions that Dubai's Road and Transport Authority (or RTA as we lovingly call them) has invested on the campaign to let us know that the damn huge HotWheels set on stilts that snakes ubiquitously through our city is 'our' metro, you still get people like me when you search for the slogan they pumped so much money into. As young people today say, 'pwned'.

confidence in media
What's worrying is not just that you get to here by searching for it, but that I have a constant drizzle of searches doing just that!

Fake deoxyribonucleic acid
The more insanely esoteric your post titles, the oddest searches you'll land. Sadly for the international criminal looking to hedge against future DNA tests by faking his DNA, the best thing the internet can offer is me whining about DNA testing in the UAE...

air outpost
It's actually slightly tragic that when you search for the name of one of the most important early documentaries to use the format we recognise today as 'documentary', created by London Films under Alex Korda and featuring a score by respected C20th composer William Allwyn, you get led here. Surely someone more interesting or important has something more interesting or important to say about this little slice of film history?

fake plastic dubai
I have nothing to add.

Mafsoum
The post linked above explains all. I'm delighted to 'own' the Arabic for schizophrenic.

nmkl pjkl ftmch
My favourite of all time. Not only do people actually SEARCH for 'nmkl pjkl ftmch', I now own it. Official. Ha, Sherif Abaza! Ha!

TDS for Aquafina and Fake Pringles
I'm actually quite proud that thousands of consumers from around the world have landed here having googled questions about what's actually in Aquafina and Pringles. It does show how 'consumer voice' can really make a difference to people's choices. I actually feel a bit useful. Have to stop that before I start taking myself seriously...