February 2004 Zeitgeist
Posted March 3rd, 2004 @ 07:36pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Every month (since February 2003) I post my site's referral search terms (not what people search for on my site). It's an interesting peek that illustrates "how people are finding me." Here's February's…
February 2004 NSLog(); ------------------------------------------------------ # Hits Percent Search Phrase ------------------------------------------------------ 1 574 3.05% camel toe 2 250 1.33% suicide girls 3 210 1.11% female masturbation 4 201 1.07% american idol 3 contestants 5 194 1.03% camel toes 6 140 0.74% american idol 4 7 130 0.69% trista and ryan 8 120 0.64% singles awareness day 9 103 0.55% women in the draft 10 95 0.50% ipod game 11 90 0.48% evan zora 12 78 0.41% album artwork 13 75 0.40% dmg files 14 71 0.38% rate my camel toe 15 66 0.35% ipod engraving 16 64 0.34% survivor playboy 17 59 0.31% fat people 18 58 0.31% britney spears sucks 19 56 0.30% American Idol 4 20 56 0.30% expensive computers
So camel toes remains at the top of the list (though with nearly half as many results as last month). Amber Tamblyn drops way down on the list and my Suicide Girls post puts them into second place. Trista and Ryan, Evan and Zora - people, when are you going to get over it? C'mon now, seriously? The rest, well, I just don't have a comment.
These search results continue to be rather illuminating. If nothing else, they illuminate just how poorly search engines describe a person's body of writing.
Posted 03 Mar 2004 at 9:23pm #
After following this same format I am starting to believe that by listing the popular terms in reports such as this these we inherently generate even more hits about said topics. So the result might be, if you want people to stop hitting your site for "Trista and Ryan" stop mentioning them every month.
Posted 03 Mar 2004 at 9:25pm #
Yeah, but that kinda ruins the possibility of having a zeitgeist, no? How else can we report what's being searched for without, y'know, reporting it?
Posted 03 Mar 2004 at 10:25pm #
Maybe we can put something in the robots.txt file that would tell Google we think these pages aren't useful pages to index. More info.