June 2009 Google Search Hits and Misses

I've been doing occasional posts on interesting Google terms people use to get here and how successful their searches have been. This time I've grouped the searches based on how close I think they got to what they were looking for.


Where Google does well:

how to dehydrate alcoholic beverages - got to a post on an Alaskan who says he's close to having dehydrated beer for campers.

There have been a number of people searching variations on those words. I thought it was interesting that domain name of the searcher was: US Dept of Treasury


the soor mulk cairt - I had to look this one up myself; I didn't remember putting it in a post. And I didn't. This phrase was in a comment made by Scotsman Mirksome Bogle on a August 2007 post. He has such a knack for catching the actual sounds.

tutsiroll tamarind - I described tamarind as having a color and texture a little like a tootsie roll and Google figured this out despite the unique spelling of tootsie roll.

lec aphorisms - This went to my post on famous people born in 1909 which included a short bio of Stanislaw Lec which included some of his aphorisms such as these:

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.

In the beginning there was the Word -- at the end just the Cliché.

Many who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lamppost. Burning stakes do not lighten the darkness.

hoover women agents - Got to my post on women in the fbi. I'd say this one was a direct hit. And it's a pretty good post too. Talks about the first women agents - a few before Hoover who left within a year of his becoming the head of the FBI. And how the next ones got in after he died.


high wire michael fajans - Bullseye again. High Wire is a series of paintings of a magician by artist Fajans at the Seattle Airport. I put the whole set of pictures into a video for the blog. If this person wanted to see those pictures, he got exactly what he wanted and there doesn't seem to be anything else posted with all the pictures. If she wanted some history about the paintings, then this is not a bullseye. But because of the query, I've added two brief descriptions of the paintings to the post. I also learned, much to my dismay, that Fajans died in 2006, in a motorcycle accident in Seattle.

high school geography test - This query came from New Jersey and got exactly what was requested - some of Ropi's high school geography test questions in Budapest. It's not as bizarre as it sounds since the test was in English. There was even a link to the whole test.
most interesting google searches - Another direct hit. But there are a number of posts on interesting google searches. Why this one and not the others?





prison talk i will self surrender to the us marshalls - Got to a post about Vic Kohring self surrendering. Was it helpful? Not sure what the viewer wanted so I can't tell.


Chanot Thailand - My post on Chanot Chumchon. is about a type of chanot, but should get the person a bit closer to what they were looking for. A chanot is a deed for property and Chanot Chumchon is a community deed for property. This one took some things from the internet, but then a fair bit of questioning of my colleagues at the office in Thailand to put together.





On the paper, but no Cigar:

what to avoid with cracked ribs got one of my reports on my son's broken ribs after he was hit by a car, but I don't think he quite got what he was after.







Missed the Target

They did get a word, but not what they wanted.

onunwor pronunciation - (from Columbus, Ohio) here's the google summary the person got:

What Do I know?: February 2008
... Gray of bribing then-East Cleveland mayor Emmanuel Onunwor involving a no-bid, ...... The pronunciation is easy to remember - “In Sea”) Land Reform ...
www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html

It's got onunwor and pronunciation. But this is one of those situations where the two words come from two totally unrelated posts. When you click, you get a long page of February 2008 posts which includes the first post listed about the Cleveland Mayor. But not the second one. My post does NOT help the reader figure out how to pronounce Onunwor's name.


"what does not guilty mean?" speeding - The google result only had two entries! A main and a secondary reference to this blog. Pretty amazing that they could find only one website with “what does not guilty mean?” and a variant of ‘speeding’. Why didn’t it offer pages without the ‘speeding’ variant? Anyway the person got two posts on the Kohring trial. The first one didn’t have the phrase in it. The second post - Kohring Day 7 - had Kohring’s attorney’s closing argument which included the sentence, “What does not guilty mean?” It also had, later on, the word speed: “He was a frequent flyer with Joyce Anderson. Should have had her on speed dial.”

celticdiva everquest - Here's a Google problem. I have celticdiva on probably all my posts, because it's one of the Alaska blogs I link to. So if someone puts that in with something else, they'll score both. And I have a post which mentions everquest - it was a post noting the passing of Gary Gycax, the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.





Does Google Have a Sense of Humor?


living next to a telephone poll - I love typos like this that turn out to make sense, but not as intended. This reader got to a post looking at the affect on polling of the increased use of cell phones.

are bugs a problem going up to alaska in july? - You know how Google sometimes asks, "Did you mean: XYZ?" Well they did this time too:

Did you mean: are drugs a problem going up to alaska in july?

Google, are you making jokes about the quality of Alaska dope in July? Coming up as number 2 out of 643,000 hits is my post “Catching Up - Thai Bugs”. While the word Alaska appears on the blog itself, it is not in the post. I can’t believe there aren’t posts on Alaska bugs in July that shouldn’t have been better matches.


Click this link for other posts on interesting Google searches.