Occasionally I check the search terms that people use to arrive at my blog, and I’m frequently surprised by what I learn. Some word strings are pleasantly surprising. I was happy to discover, for instance, that some who were looking for information about Brooklyn, Geneva, London, and Paris found their way to my blog.
On the other hand, some of the search terms mystify me. One recent phrase, for example, was “Older women in Santa’s lap.” To the person who plugged that phrase into a search engine and found this site: I can assure you, you will not find what you’re looking for here. Another person found my blog by using the term “zit.” To the zit-curious: while there is a photograph in which you might be interested, this blog is not primarily about pimples.
Someone else recently used the phrase “crime scene photos” and wound up here. I made the mistake of looking that phrase up in Google Images to see how it led to my blog. Unless you want to become intimately familiar with the lengths and depths of human depravity, I would advise you not to do that.
Then there are the commercial sites that somehow deposit their web addresses in the “Referrers” section of my dashboard. Neat trick, a$$holes, but I’m not buying what you’re selling. Please stop muddying up my statistics. (I say “a$$holes” not so much to censor myself as to make sure that my blog doesn’t appear in the search results when people go searching for the other thing.)
Regrettably, no one has ever found this site by looking up something heady like “Book reviews and Richard Dawkins.” I finally gave up on the review essay that I was writing (on the books of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Greg Epstein, Jennifer Hecht, et al.), because no one was reading it. For better or worse, I began using the blog as one might use a facebook page. I guess that I’ll need to find ways to attract visitors to the blog’s intellectual content. Suggestions are welcome.
