When looking through the searches that bring people to fitzage.com, I am often humored by the results. Sometimes I learn things about the way google works, and other times it's just funny. For example, when you have a front page or archive pages that include the text of multiple articles on a wide variety of topics, combined terms from the different articles can make for some interesting searches making their way to my site.
Take this search: “Christian reviews, presidential.” This doesn't really fit any articles on my site. Yes, I have a very basic list of some presidential candidate scores. I also have the word Christian numerous times, including in the article about presidential candidates. I also have a reviews section. But the combination isn't quite what the visitor was looking for, I'm sure.
There are other ones with the same problem, like “tim keller sexual sin.” They were probably looking for some article written by Tim Keller on sexual sin. Tim Keller is mentioned in one of my articles, but sexual sin isn't discussed in that article. Rather, it's discussed in an article with some thoughts from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
Adina's name also gets mixed in with some other things frequently: “pastor and adina” and “adina beer” are two recent ones that bear no resemblance to anything I've written. They just pull in Adina's name from the header, and random text from any of the articles on any pages.
Another one that caught my eye was “are girls named adina prett” (and yes, the y was missing. On the front page of fitzage.com, the word girl shows up once, the word pretty shows up once, and Adina's name shows up once in the header. There must not have been very many other search results for that search. And yes, Adina is pretty, although I can't speak for other girls of the same name.
Sometimes people actually appear to get exactly what they're looking for. Like “interesting facts about beer,” which bears a striking resemblance to one of my article titles. Also, “calorie counts for guiness beer,” which is included in the same article, although a little buried perhaps. I also get a number of visits for searches with variations on the theme of alcoholic root beer floats, as I posted an article a while back on how tasty a root beer float was with a little rum added to it.
I also get a number of visitors looking for Geek Squad reviews, based on my article I wrote about them. I gave them a thumbs down. On a similar note are people looking for CoffeeFool, who I also gave a thumbs down, without ever having actually tried their product.
I'm guessing the person searching for “the demon drink the spirit behind alcoholism christian” didn't really get what they were looking for, as there is no beverage called “the demon drink” on this blog.
I have learned that I should probably write more reviews, because there are a number of searches that make it to the reviews portion of my site looking specifically for the products that I have reviewed. My Twitter friends have told me I should write more Mac software reviews, as I seem to have tried a huge number of the available shareware apps. Maybe I'll get on that.
In regards to that, the person who searched for “nissan steal thermas” is lucky that Google is a better speller than they are.
January 23, 2008