I haven't done a post on interesting (strange?) google searches for a while. I got too busy with other things to keep up with them. But once in a while a saw one I felt the need to capture for posterity. So, here they are.
skype sex during deployment - - went to a post on a legislative committee talking about child custody during deployment which mentioned skype as a way deployed military could talk to their kids.
can you buy prostitutes at the ch2m man camp in north slope alaska - This man (I know, I'm assuming again) got to a post about CH2M Hill Corruption in Ohio. Probably he meant a different kind of prostitute.
outer space tables fastende to the grround I'm afraid I didn't note where this one ended up. Anyone want to take a shot at what he was after?
what to do in a day to be an interesting person - this got to a post called Interesting People and Events at UAA. I hope it was helpful, but don't know it was what this person from New Zealand was looking for.
black and tan flesh eating beetles- Last time I did a Search post like this I had along list of different ways people got to the post Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Flies or Fungus Gnats? But none were as colorful as this one. I also have lots of hits that go to Brown Bug. It would seem a lot of people are experiencing the natural world in the form of bugs.
what can i send in the mail to my husband in alaska 2010 - This one just got to the blog, no special post. Don't think she found what she was looking for.
steven nannas arms guns manufacture - I think Google is trying too hard to have hits. What Do I Know? comes up #1 out of 45,000 hits, with this:
What Do I Know?
Apr 15, 2010 ... I apologize Steve. I was lost in the moment and am trying to get a grip on myself as .... NANA/TECK Contract Lobbyist; annual fee $20000.00 ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/ - 9 hours ago - Similar
This is pretty slim pickins. Why even bother?
how much money do you get for setting up residency in alaska - This New Zealand based surfer got to a post on this year's PFD application deadline. Others have asked the same question.
parkinson's disease billboard omaha - This went to a picture from a post about a fire prevention billboard in Thailand. Not exactly what the searcher was looking for. So why did this post show up? Because I have a link to a Parkinsons blog and some posts about Omaha. So I had all the words somewhere on the blog. Just not in one post. But this was an image search, so the person must have clicked to enlarge the photo. Probably because it was too small to read and he thought it might be about Parkinsons and in Omaha. By the way, google's new image search results are a huge improvement over the old way.
who is the old bald guy with black glasses that soes sis flags commercils? - This person got to a post on Jehovah's Witnesses.
My notes for this bi-monthly post mostly got wiped out because blogspot saves changes almost instantly. I hit something accidentally and everything disappeared. I hit Control Z (Undo) but it didn't come back. Blogspot instantly saved my changes and so wiped out everything I had saved for five weeks, but not posted. It was gone forever.
So, necessity being the mother of invention, I'm looking at this regular google search post from a different angle this month. It seems a lot of people have little black bugs. So, for the last three weeks of February, these are some of the ways people got to my post Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Fly or Fungus Gnat?
black bugs flying around house plants - New York black gnats in house - from somewhere in Eastern time zone. black tiny non-fruit flies - Louth, Lincolnshire, UK "fruit flies" "house plants" "fungus gnats" - Palisades Park, New Jersey fungi gnats - London fungus gnat - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania fungus gnats picture - Quebec fungus gnats versus fruit fly gnats black - San Mateo, California gnats bugs - from Friendswood, Texas. fungus gnats bananas - San Antonio, Texas fungus gnat larvae -Odessa, Texas house gnats - Pacific Coast Time how to eliminate tiny fruit fly -US eastern standard time insects homes colorado tin - Littleton, Colorado little flies in houseplants - Brggen, Germany little tiny black bugs that skip and fly and infest my house - Orlando, Florida photos of small black flying gnats - St. Louis, Missouri pics, gnats in my plants that bite - Houma, Louisiana [extension service said they don't bite] pictures of gnats and fruit flies - Vienna, Virginia picture of soil gnats - Seattle show me pictures of all gnats - Houston, Texas small black bugs in house - central Canada mall black bugs that look like fruit flies - Newport Beach, California small black flies related to fruit flies - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania small black insect fruit - from Nerang, Queensland, Australia small dark flies in my hous - Black Diamond, Alberta, Canada small flying black bugs in kitchen picture - Hawaii time zone small gnats february seattle wa - Boise, Idaho tiny black aphids on houseplants - Champlin, Minnesota tiny black flies in offic tiny black flies in seattle - Lynnwood, Washington tiny black flies on car - Bellingham, WA tiny black gnats - Liverpool, New York< tiny black insects in house thailand - Thailand tiny flies in houseplants? - US Central Time tiny fruit flies - mountain time tiny fruit flies - This one was from the US Dept. of Agriculture in Livonia, New York what are small black flying gnat like bugs in winter time - Kansas City, Missouri what are small black insects on my houseplant - Eastern Standard Time winter gnat -
And a few of the other terms that were interesting to me:
kiwi oatmeal - Got to my low calorie oatmeal post. There's a regular trickle of people searching for low calorie oatmeal, but this is the first one I've seen that included kiwi in the search. Good to know I'm not the only one who sees the potential of cooking kiwi in oatmeal. (The fruit, not the bird.)
what to do with tight stomach on botton left side and retum feel funny to can't move my bowels what to do - This one from Surprise, Arizona got to the main page.
stink pen with an ordinary matches - got to the picture (left) of S holding his bottle of homemade pig stink mitigator
pictures of elephants in the hospital having a baby - and I do have pictures of an elephant hospital in the Thai elephant conservation center post. But not having a baby.
Yahoo v. Google
This first one below is a Yahoo search with what the person got from the Yahoo search page. I don't see any of the words they were searching for (except 'a' and 'the' and 'to'.) I probably have some of those words on my blog, but you'd think they would highlight them in the search findings. i am a pharmacist in vietnam,when i live in the u.s.a do i have to study from the beginning pharmacy degree -
Here's a google search that also isn't really related to anything on my blog, but at least all six words - even if not in order - were on the page they found:
The genus is named for Hercules, who is reputed to have used these plants for medicine. Early in each year, Native Americans peeled and ate the young sweet, .... University Caucus Formation Love Fest · Alaska Community Services Lobbying ...
For people who are wondering how I know about these searches and where they come from, I use Sitemeter. You can go to the sitemeter button on the right hand column and see what information is available by clicking on the number which is around 176,000 now. Here's a picture of what it looks like. This is an image (not actual text) so the link there doesn't work. Actually, I could link it, but then you wouldn't find again, so go look. While Sitemeter gives the choice to have the data private, I leave it open so people can see what kind of data are collected.
Once again I post some of the search terms people used and what they got to list some interesting search terms and to see how google works.
Bullseye
santa monica trapeze school - this was an image search that got to a post on the Santa Monica pier with a photo of the trapeze school.
rockin dentist - I actually have a post called 'Rockin Dentist'. I got scheduled once with another dentist in my dentist's office and it turned out he has a second amateur career as a rock guitarist.
how do you get prickly pears outta your skin - I had the answer to that at the bottom of a post on eating prickly pear. (Duct tape)
unfuck the world, the song - This got to an audio clip of the song from Kathryn Blume's play Boycott when she performed it here in Anchorage. But the most interesting part of this was that the computer seeking this came from the World Bank. Does this mean they finally have defined the problem they're working on?
black members of congress - I take a certain amount of pleasure when someone at
the ISP "Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives" comes to a blog in Alaska to get information about Congress.
fruit flies fungus gnats difference - Got to Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Fly or Fungus Gnat? The visitor, from Boston, probably had fruit flies, because the outclick was to the Oklahoma State University page on fruit flies, not the Colorado link on fungus gnats.
famous people who was born in pansilvania that start with the letter c - First, I need to say this person was from Pennsylvania. Google did manage to get him to the post on famous people born in 1909, and two - David Riesman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz - were born in Pennsylvania, but as you can see there was only one c between them and it wasn't at the beginning.
difference between a clique and a colloquialism - Never thought about a connection between those two words, but I can see how this Dutch searcher might have. Unfortuantely, I don't have anything on that and google sent him to Difference between a Cyclone and a Hurricane. (I probably jumped to the wrong conclusion on the nationality. It was from Holland, but Schiphol, which is the Amsterdam airport and the computer uses US English.)
a yellow egg with a tan spot. the moment you look away from it, it moves to another space - got to a picture of a yellow egg I did in photo shop in class last year..
Not even close.
2.employee bloggers sometimes use pseudonyms. under what conditions might the blogging service be forced to provide the real identity of the blogger?- This one got to a post that at least touches the issues here, The Right to Privacy, Bloggers and Privacy. This post discusses privacy in general and specifically the outing of Alaska's most read blogger at Mudflats. It doesn't quite get into the question sought though.
gender butterfly abdomen - When I stopped to think about it, it seemed to be about how to tell the gender of a butterfly. If it was, it got a pretty picture of a white butterfly with brown markings in the foothills in Northern Thailand, but nothing on determining gender. This one got me wondering. If you're interested, Clay shows how to identify a Monarch's gender when it's still a chrysalis. Dragonfly power gives a more thorough explanation. Scroll down to Part 1.
do flies know when they're full - Interesting query. I'm not even sure where this one landed. I certainly didn't have the answer.
do humans live in alaska - This one came from a computer that is set for Arabic from Jordan. So at least we can say some people in that part of the world are as ignorant of us as we are of them. Google sent them to the post "To Live and Die in Wales Alaska" He did get the answer, that yes we do.
do hipsters go skiing - I wrote about the movie Hipsters and I mention skiing now and then in my posts, but there's nothing that answers the question. Google took them to a post on the Russian movie Hipsters that won the Anchorage International Film Festival Best Feature.
Missed the target even.
if you don't know when you were born how old are you - This is a legitimate question. Got to famous people born in 1909.
racket tailed drongo sound clip - There actually is video with a racket tailed drongo calling, but Google took this person to a post in the same month on Burma and bio fuels policy. If the searcher had been persistent, he might have followed my search instructions in the upper right hand corner. If he had searched for the word drongo on that page he would have found the link to the post with what he was after. But the Sitemeter data suggests that he didn't get to it. He was so close to exactly what he wanted, but Google should have put him on the right page.
how much does it cost to get into amber in nature the mueseum in warsaw??tell me now!!! i need this for homework!!! - Despite the fact that my blog can't even come close to answering the question, What Do I Know came up first out of 1340 hits. Why? Because google uses robots, not people to find the hits. They found a page with enough posts to match six of the words in his search command. (It does sound like some bratty kid doesn't it?) But there are no two words together even. If mine was the number 1 hit, can you imagine how useless the others were? And if there were some that got him to the museum in warsaw, why was mine number 1? Does google think it's better to give lots of wrong answers than to say, "Sorry, we can't find anything useful"? Here's the google link he found:
You can get the whole letter at the Warsaw Gazette.] ...... There's so much to tell...... I don't need to do my homework, the college guys like me just the way I am. ...... Seward Highway that is now a bike trail to Girdwood, I found this nature lesson - on cottonwoods. ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html - Cached -
Google Sense of Humor
politicians laughing - This image search got to a picture of a white crested laughing thrush. Why not? Unfortunately, it wasn't even a good picture.
I started doing these posts to highlight unusual search terms that got someone to this blog. This evolved into an assessment of how well Google directed someone based on the search terms, but it still has a mix of the two.
Here are two new insights I've gleaned about google search seems to work that I've gotten from this month.
1. Google takes all the terms on 'one page.' On a blog that will depend on how the blogger has set the pages. In my case, a 'page' is a month unless the month has too many posts and runs out of space. I'm assuming this because Google finds terms from unrelated posts and either picks one post to send the searcher to, or the whole page. You can see some examples below where I show what the Google search page showed the searcher.
2. Image searches look at the words in the post as well as the tags on the image. Sometimes this works well, sometimes not.
3. Google is pretty good at figuring out mispellings.
Bulls-eye karen language hello - This person didn't just get the words for hello in Karen written phonetically, this person got a video tape of a Karen villager in Northern Thailand teaching me how to say hello in Karen. I'd call that a bulls-eye. Now, whether the dialect of Karen spoken in Texas is the same dialect, I can't say.
michael palin book apple seed potato - got to a post on Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. which discusses apples, seeds, and potatoes. I'm impressed how Google can sort through mispellings. Pollan is not related to Palin.
botany of desire - One of the interesting parts of following google hits, is getting a sense that something is happening related to one of the items on your blog. I started getting an increasing number of hits for Botany of Desire as publicity came out about the television show based on the book.
why are professional baseball diamonds different sizes - this person got to a post "Why are baseball diamonds different sizes?" and then to the link to the NPR interview that answered the question. I'd forgotten all about this post. I had to go check the answer too.
grilled sticky rice - And they got a picture of grilled sticky rice in the banana leaf wrapper and a loose recipe as related by the Chiang Mai shopowner.
mountain ask leaf - I'll give Google a bullseye for this one. I'm assuming that the searcher mistyped and so did Google, giving him a picture of mountain ash leaves.
Close Do spittle bugs have teeth - They got to this post on spittle bugs which shows the spittle, but doesn't discuss teeth.
classical music effects on ice crystals - This was an image search and they got a picture of ice crystals on our storm door at -10˚F (-23˚C). But no music.
used italian ice machine - got to picture of an old Thai ice scraping machine in a post from Chiang Mai. Who knows? Maybe it originally came from Italy.
can't seem to wake up at amrit vela - I can't seem to wake up at the Eiffel Tower in the morning. Sometimes these searches leave me scratching my head only to find I do have something on this that I've totally forgotten. This got to a post on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India where you can find out what amrit vela means. It does make sense after all. Well, actually, instead of giving the specific post, Google gave the whole archive page for October 2006. Again, some of the words come from other posts. So you have to scroll down to Oct. 25. red & yellow flower pointed upwards indoor plants long stem -got to this picture of a red flower on the trail to Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai, Thailand. BTW, Doi means mountain, Suthep is a type of angel.
snow leopard update blank screen - I got a lot of these, more for 'black' screen. With good reason. I have several posts on my snow leopard problem. Google first took most people to a post I wrote before I had the solution. When I saw this, I did put links in all the posts about the black screen to get them to the cure post. And only some people took that link. By October 10, it seemed that most of these were being sent to the post with the 'cure' at the end of the title. So Google can learn. The number of these searches also confirms that this is inherent in Snow Leopard.
A Stretch - nice green birds for cage - This was a person from Canada. I can understand wanting to have a nice green bird around, but the idea of putting a bird into a cage for one's entertainment is a little disturbing. I recognize there's a difference between capturing a wild bird and putting it into a cage and getting one born in captivity. But people raise birds to sell only because there are people who want to put them in cages. This person got to a picture of picture of a bird of paradise in the Bird Park in Singapore. It's a very big cage and you can barely see the bird for all the greenery, but it's still in a cage. Sort of like being under house arrest.
kenny g is a jehovahs witness - Well, I have posts on Jehovah's witnesses and I have a post on Pat Metheny writing about Kenny G. But nothing that combines the two. There was a surprisingly large number of people googling Pat Metheny on Kenny G.
apple genius josh at apple store santa monica fired - Well, I did go to the Apple Store in Santa Monica and I did spend time at the genius bar, but I don't recall anyone named Josh. Google found all the words in scattered over four posts. The searcher simply got to my blog - not even a specific post.
parking garages hidden inside mountains pictures - This Austrian searcher got a picture of a parking garage in LA, not at all hidden in a mountain. It was way down on the page they got, but since it was an image search, they did get to choose from a page full of pictures.
famous people who were born in dangerous places - Don't know how helpful this was, but it was an interesting search. They got to Famous People Born in 1909.
what ethical obligations do you personally feel towards wolves and whales - Got to a post about an article written about Wales, Alaska. It talked about ethical obligations urban Alaskans have to understanding the history of rural Alaska among other things.
Probably Not Google's Fault
Sometimes searchers give Google a real challenge. What did these people want?
how to make the constitution 1500 papers in photoshop - Who knows what this person was after? Not me. Their search got several posts mashed into one and it linked them to one on a post where I photoshopped a picture I took while cross country skiing. But I put the blame here on the person searching - what was he looking for?
what can i grow that isn't agapanthus - lot's of things I'd venture. Can't blame Google for sending this to a post that mentions agapanthus. This is someone who needs to think about her search terms more carefully.
thyland people are eatting abortion child flash is it true - this query came from someone in India who got to a post on the ethics of publishing photos of children. Google combined Children, people's, flash, eating from several different places on the blog.
photo gull light cloudy sky new york city airport - Was this person looking for a specific picture or a picture with all those things? Since this was an image search the searcher presumably got lots of pictures to look at. But this one had no gull, was not New York City or even an airport. But It did have clouds and blue sky. The post it was in mentioned the Santa Monica Airport. I've started to notice - now that I can usually see the image search terms - that Google considers not only the terms in the photo file name, but also terms in the post as well.
does human nature exists in everyone - Now this is an interesting question. I've never directly addressed this question, but the searcher got directed to the post on why everyone should study philosophy.
last year when it snowed for eight days complete sentence? - Not completely sure what the searcher wanted. Whether his words were a complete sentence? I'm guessing it was a school assignment and he had to complete the sentence. The google hit combined several posts and had the word snow. The post was about the president-elect breaking with tradition by using complete sentences when he talked.
You Missed This One Google
Most of these are Google trying too hard to come up with something. Google has trouble saying, "I can't find anything" and maybe that's ok. People find things they didn't know they were looking for.
mango 21 44000 - There's 44,000 in one post. mango in another. And 21 in the google search information. But I don't think this was what the German searcher was looking for.
13 Sep 2008 ... That would be like having 44000 people rally in New York City, 20800 in LA, or 15350 in Chicago. ... I can see the mangoand sticky rice, but I can't reach it. But I'll learn. .....21 hours ago ... www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/.../44000-nye-at-alaska-women-against- palin.html - Im Cache - Ähnlich
wat do they mean when they say the the duty of the beast in flesh by a split second - Maybe I should have a category of "Searcher goofed." Google found some posts that had some of words. But they weren't all one posts and ultimately I doubt they answered whatever question the searcher had. Here's what Google gave him that got him to this blog:
Jan 5, 2008 ... Yes, despite the flesh in the ADN promo article, it's fine for kids ...... 666, the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast Who is the Antichrist .... Whatever they say is calculated. Truth is a strategic choice, ..... Just because one has the legal right to do something doesn't mean they should do it. ... whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html - Cached - Similar -
I'm surprised they didn't find 'wat' too.
Should Google have some sort of minimum standard of words being together in a single post? While the bots can find the words really fast, it seems it still takes a human to say, "This is gibberish."
Or is this some sort of internet beach combing and people are just curious about what they might find? The collection of posts Google offered are all from one archived month. I think this is what I've seen before for what seems like random words collected from different posts. If that's accurate, then they have limited the searches to some identified 'page'. Thus they found a single 'page' that had the most words on it, though for a blog that means lots of generally unrelated posts. Perhaps it would be more meaningful on a regular website page. Perhaps they should have a filter for blogs.
what does moosegoose look like - Let me know if you find out. Google gave them a post titled "Moose, Goose Lake, UAA Science Building" I got another one about moosegoose as October ended.
molar tooth - The searcher got a picture (this was image search) of growing tamarind from seed. But it tells us a bit about how the image search works. In the text I mention that the seeds are about the size of a molar tooth. So Google is checking out the words in the text around the picture. This one clearly missed completely.
Does Google have a Sense of Humor?
money saving shopkeeper expert - This image search got to a picture labeled "Buddha Image Shopkeeper Chiang Mai." The picture is of a shop that sells Buddha Images.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's another list of things people googled to get to this blog. Some worked, but a lot of these got here because I just happened to have some of the unusual words or phrases they were looking for, but not the answer they were looking for.
how would i know if someone did voodoo on me? I know this person didn't get the answer to the question. I jokingly had speculated that perhaps someone had done voodoo on me in this post about the how we know what is real, in this case, in the FBI investigation of Alaskan politicians. And tonight I could probably write another chapter given that the attorney general has asked for the release of Kott and Kohring.
ada ohio cemetery in guinness book of world records My post of famous people born in 1909 included a mention of Rollo May and the fact he was born on April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio. Probably not what they were searching for.
keyboard problem mac h is 2 j is 4 problem - Not exactly sure what the problem is here. If you hit F6 on my macbook, it changes some of the keys and J=1, K=2, L=3, etc.. Perhaps the searcher had a different Mac where those letters were a little different. In any case, you have to turn off NumLock by hitting F6 again. But that wasn't the answer on my post about my keyboard locking. But maybe the person learned something else useful.
who was the first female fbi agent - Bingo! This person probably got what the desired info on my post of leftover notes on female FBI agents.
do florence reece's artistic accomplishments contradict? - this is one of those bizarre google results where it identifies search words in several unrelated posts. Actually, in this case they are all from one post, but a looong post. The one on Famous People. Here's what they found at google - four of the six words in the search: What Do I know?: Famous People Born in 1909 And I added one person to Brainy's list - Art Tatum. ... With her posthumous works - 16 volumes, edited by André A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy - Weil has earned a reputation as ... Her web presence is full of contradicting stories. ..... when young Rollo (given the name Reece at birth) was still a small child. ...
do the governor of a state have the right to tell a store how much to charge on a certain product if he know that the prices are to high? I didn't answer that question anywhere; this person got the post on Governor Palin and product placement.
how to find ip address for anonymous posts at blogger.com - Well the post google sent them to - figuring out my anonymous blog commenter - doesn't answer the question. On other posts I do show some of the things that my sitemeter tells me about people coming to the site, including ip address.
july date full moon anchorage This one was from Australia. I didn't give out that information. But they did get to see the April full moon at Half Moon Bay.
find birthtown of poet,
author of the temple,
born in 1909
poet born 1909 the temple "poet born 1909 the temple" got to the Famous People Born in 1909 post. But I got curious why so many people were suddenly searching for this and I found a puzzle in the Times. So I did some sleuthing of my own and posted what I found. And that got me nearly 1000 hits over the week of the puzzle.
how many people were born on each date since 1909? I have a few people listed on different dates for 1909, but not all the people.
free cicada piercing sucking mouthparts pictures - I think this picture which I took is better than what they found at cicadas in the background, where there's a picture I found on line. But I'm not sure the "piercing sucking mouthparts" are all that clear in any of the pictures. But the post they got to had audio of cicadas in Thailand.
if the world is what it is because we have created it how do we know whats real - This person got to a post titled "Blogging - What's Real? How Do We Know? Stevens, Kepner, Joy There's a little that addresses the question, but most is about the trials and investigation.
fishing with cormorants japan opium connection? This one came from Singapore and I think what they got was just to the blog, not a particular post. I have no idea why it got here.
i know this boy who talks to me only when he is high - another one that got to the blog, but not a particular post.
blog in general leaking petrol tank emergency fix - Definitely got an answer to the question, my story about how some Ugandan truck drivers used a bar of soap to temporarily fill a hole in the petrol tank. This one came from Sydney, Australia.
pictures/photos from global summit on climate change alaska pictures This one was from Chennai, India and they got to a post with pictures from the indigenous peoples global summit on climate change. But why doesn't Google send them to the label that would give them all of the posts on the summit instead of just one of the posts?
what is the difference between a cyclone and a typo - I love typos like this. I'm pretty sure this searcher from Melbourne, Australia was looking for the difference between cyclones and typhoons. And they got that at this post.
I put up these posts to highlight the power of internet searches, how they sometimes go poorly astray, some of the more unexpected things people search for, the satisfaction I get when someone appears to have found just what they want, and the frustration when they get close, but don't know how to get the rest of the way. I learn about how people get here and maybe someone reading this will figure out something useful here too.
what can i do to be more interesting? A reasonable question, but I don't think this person found the answer here. The person got to the November google search page.
pomegranate phone release india - sadly the pomegranate phone is not a real phone, but I was surprised at the number of people who thought it was. The spot is very well done which is why I posted it originally. This query was from someone in Bombay
does the fbi pay for house hunting for new employees - this person got to the post on the FBI complaint by Chad Joy which did not answer the question, but maybe raised a lot of questions the seeker hadn't even considered.
what is the thai version of lol - Bingo! Here's someone who got exactly what was sought: lol in Thai.
does a yellow shirt go with red shorts - Absolutely, but they didn't get that answer. Instead they got a post on the political implications of redshirts and yellowshirts in Thailand.
do americans even know where wales is? This UK browser didn't get the answer either, but at least now knows that the US has a place called Wales too. To Live in Die in Wales Alaska was probably a lot more than the person was expecting.
famous people born in pennsylvania with their last name beggining with u (1909) - If this browser, who got to Famous People Born in 1909, searched the page for Pennsylvania, he would have found that David Riesman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz were both born in Pennsylvania, but obviously neither had a U in their last name. The closest we got were a V(elez) and two W's (Welty and Weil) There was also U. Thant. But not from Pennsylvania.
how many people are famous for knowing more than one languages - Think about this for a bit. I guess if someone spoke 25 languages fluently, that might be the reason they are famous. I can think of famous people whose knowledge of a second language was much appreciated - such as Jackie Kennedy who could speak French. Anyway, this person got to famous people born in 1909 too.
did lady natasha spender home in france burn down - Also got to the same place where there was something on Stephen Spender, Lady Natasha's husband.
who is the famous person successful in studying at university more than 1 - This came from a computer using US English in Cambodia. Also got to famous people.
elvi gray-jackson's values seems to be affecting policy decisions - Is that surprising? Don't most politician's values affect how they vote on policies? This searcher at least knew how to search the blog for 'elvi-gray-jackson' when she got an archive page full of posts. But what she got was about the election between Traini and Gray-Jackson.
know your cranes t shirt - Here's one of those google hits that doesn't work. I had a post on Chiang Mai T shirts (which the browser got to) as well other posts on Sandhill and other kinds of cranes. The browser clicked on a picture from that page Chiang Mai T-shirts. But that got me curious - was there a T-shirt that showed you the different kinds of cranes? So I looked at the google page they got to. Well, the "know your cranes" t-shirt wasn't quite what I was expecting. Nor was the other T-shirt google found.
"abie baby" production - A number of people searched for variations of this. I'm not totally sure what they were looking for, but they got to a Lincoln's Birthday post I did with an excerpt from the Anchorage Hair cast singing "happy birthday abie babie".
ted the dog hunting for rabbis vidios - I first thought this was some sort of sick anti-semitic joke. But eventually I realized that the searcher had left out the 't' at the end of rabbi. The post he got was definitely not what he was looking for. It was about Ted Stevens and the Seward Sea-Life Center.
how do you increase morale in a deli - The wonderful serendipity of googling. In a post called doing what's possible I, by chance, gave some examples, two of which included the magic words
"If she told you to pick up some bagels in a New York deli for lunch (and you were both in Los Angeles,) you'd laugh." "improve the morale and increase production"
furniture that hangs from the roof inside - I really wanted to see what this looks like, but couldn't find it. The person did get to see some furniture in Hang Dong.
chanot deed - Another bingo, almost. This was not something I expected anyone to be looking up. The search came from Denmark. I had just posted on this Thai form of property deed. So who was looking it up? An NGO worker? A corporation? Or maybe a Dane married to a Thai trying to figure out what happens when they buy property together in Thailand? Or maybe his attorney? Actually the post - on Chanot Chumchon - they got to probably wasn't as useful as a later post on the types of documentation for Thai property.
how does the gut in death row work harder - Not sure what this person was looking for, but he got a post on why I think the death penalty shouldn't be reinstated in Alaska.
kuala lumpur bird park owl take picture - This is a real bingo (I think, I'm never sure I really understand what people are looking for.) There's a spot in the KL bird park where you can have yourpicture taken with birds, including two owls. This googler got to that post which included this picture of people getting their picture taken with the owls in the background.
steve keudell.blogspot.com - This one disturbs me. Actually, I got quite a few like this. Steve is a farmer in Oregon who got electrocuted when a tree branch fell on a power line. I started getting hits with his name one day and it didn't make sense, so I looked what else they got on google. I found an article about the accident. I've got Steve in my url so sometimes I get people looking for other Steves. So I put up a post about it, with some information about the accident and asked people to let me know if there was a better link for people to get info. They let me know about stevekuedell.blogspot.com. I posted it. But as a new blog (I assume) it wasn't as high up on google's radar as my blog so I kept getting more and more people. So this is someone who had the right url. If they had put it into the url window they'd have gotten directly to the right site. But they googled it instead and got to my site. Which now had a link at the beginning that sent them to the right site where they could get the latest update. And according the sitemeter information, they didn't go to that link. There were a number of hits like this. And others that did go to the better link. It's partly about knowing how to read and paying attention, it's partly internet literacy. And maybe some people didn't want to know more than I had up, even if it was a week old. Here's the most current information on Steve's condition.
information on boyfriends cheeting on their girlfriends and the girlfriends pay the price - no comment. Not sure why this blog came up. Here's what their google search showed:
What Do I know?: March 2009 ... charge less, hurting shops who pay the price of legally and safely disposing of waste. ... schools and a health clinic as well as information on various ... whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html - 451k - Cached
I can't believe this was the best google could do.
a day i will never forget in chiang mai zoo with my family - I'm guessing this is of the genre of "Googling to find stuff for the paper I have to write for school". It was US Pacific Standard Time, from a Thai language computer. And they got my post on a day at the Chiang Mai zoo.
Here are some of the Google search terms that got people to my blog this past month that were interesting or strange or reveal problems with Google search. And while people got here through other search engine, the search terms of other engines are always as clear as google's.
story of famous person who want to know english
An interesting query. They got to the post of famous people born in 1909, one of the more popular posts.
why people born
This is like asking the meaning of life. This one got to the same page as the one above. I don't think they found the answer.
names of famus people the discoverd bits of the earth
I should have noted where this searcher was from. While some Americans make fun of people whose English isn't quite right, a lot of US born Americans couldn't write that much in any language besides English, even with errors. Not sure what they were looking for, but this was another famous people of 1909 hit.
how old would you be if you born in 1908?
This one got to famous people born in 1908. And may actually have gotten the answer there. Here's someone who can spell, write grammatically, can search google, but can't figure out the difference between 2009 and 1908.
on planes why do famous people get to be in firstclass easy and normal people have to try hard to get in?
Um, because they have first class tickets? Also got to famous people born in 1909.
maimonides and stress management
The reader got to a book review of a biography of Maimonides. This also reflects a problem with google - that gets worse below - of showing words from totally unrelated posts or parts of a blog and linking them together. Here they got to me because I had Maimonides and a link to the blog Stress Management and Other Things. Google takes them to the first scrap of a post. That's why I put up the "Can't Find It?" box in the upper right corner - for people whose answer might be here, but Google dropped them off at the wrong post.
This got them to probably the most viewed post of the month, Let's Get Real About Mary Beth Kepner. It certainly got the most hits on a single day - the day after the New York Times carried a story that featured her prominently. Yes, there was mention of a hotel room in that, but not about sneaking in. We could put this one with the one about famous people getting into first class.
i looking 4 job bakery in bangkok
Another Google result that mixed terms from different posts. This person got to Charlie's Bakery in Anchorage.
do foxes go into rabbit holes
I'm sure my blog doesn't answer this question literally, but maybe figuratively. This search got to the post about the blog Tom Anderson read before heading to prison. Preparing to go into the Rabbit Hole, gave some excerpts from an account of life in a minimum security prison.
what does it require to live there in alaska
This surfer got to To Live or Die in Wales, Alaska and the Ethics of Outside Writing About Alaska. That's probably a skewed view of life in Alaska. Good, one more who might go to Seattle instead of Anchorage.
rid trees of doves
The post with the picture of the crested serpent eagle, where this person landed, also mentioned the spotted dove. I didn't ask Tony if crested serpent eagles would rid your tree of doves. I think they eat snakes, but maybe other birds too.
hamatria anger
I love searches like this. I had no idea why they got to my blog, but sure enough, in the post about Ted Stevens and the Seward Sealife Center, I quoted someone else on hamatria anger. So I learned something from my own blog.
linksys rules for radicals
This got to the famous people born 1909 post linked above where there is a brief bio of Saul Alinsky who wrote Rules for Radicals. It's interesting how brains work. This isn't the first person to get here this way. We tend to take sounds and match them to the closest thing we have in our brain to that sound. At least that's my experience. So someone hearing "Alinsky" who has never heard that name before, but has heard of linksys, hears linksys rather than Alinsky.
linksys router hijacked
I love people who google this. It makes me feel good to know that someone is going to actually get an answer to the problem and that I'm paying forward all the people who have answered my questions about how to use the computer. But this one had a scary twist to it. It came from a computer at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If they get their router hijacked what all else happened that we don't know about.
Of course, this is a good example of taking a scrap of information and jumping to unfounded conclusions. Maybe it was just an employee whose home router was hijacked and he was making good use of downtime at the office.
The Death of Tony Ball in Chiang Mai
Google not doing it's job too well. I knew that Tony Ball was alive on Saturday, and even after that because we've exchanged some emails. But what did the searcher get? She got to a review of the movie "Whirlwind." Here's the blurb you'd see on Google:
The reason they support the death penalty is what I would call one of the gut .... Sommersturm at CMU Film Space · Birding with Tony Ball · LOL in Thai · Earthal Eclipse? .... [January 13 - We're in Chiang Mai, Thailand until April] ... www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-basic-need-does-death-penalty.html - 19 hours ago - Similar pages
There are five different posts merged into there. Google gives you the one with the first word in the search - in this case - death. But I looked at what else that person got.
Maekok River Lodge - Rare birds of Ban Thaton by Tony Ball... south Wales, who was murdered in a guesthouse in Chiang Mai in August 2000. Last month, a Scottish backpacker Mark Lemetti, 24, was beaten to death in southern Thailand. ... www.worldtwitch.com/thailand_tours_travel.htm - Similar pages
You'd certainly think that Tony Ball had been murdered in 2000 in a guest house if you didn't read this carefully. But Tony Ball is in one post and ..."south Wales, who was murdered" is a different post.
So the person who got to my blog, it appears from the sitemeter tracks, never found the pictures of Tony alive and well on Saturday morning.
