Random Rants


The Search Engine Blues
Search engines are amazing things. You just type in a couple of words and within a few seconds the search engine spits out all the information you could ever have wanted to find. That's the theory, at least. For in practice - as every Internet user knows - search engines might answer questions you never asked, might give you results you never wanted.

Case in point: One of the very first things I did after getting an Internet access was type the words "Boston Blackie" into a search engine. Boston Blackie is the protagonist a series of early 20th century crime novelettes and information about him is very hard to find. But now that I had the Internet, it should be a piece of cake. Or so I thought. For I got about 120 000 results, most of which were homepages of dog breeders. Looking for another, somewhat better known early 20th century detective character named Nick Carter gave me thousands of results for Backstreet Boys fanpages, because one of their members happens to share the name of the fictional detective.

Of course, once you know a bit more about search engines, you can work your way around all those unwanted results by adding additional search parameters. It didn't help me much in the case of Boston Blackie, who is such an obscure character that even the mighty and wise Internet hasn't heard of him. But it helped in a lot of other cases.

Once I got my own site, however, a whole new type of search engine madness started. I don't want to go into what it's like to manually submit your page to fifty different search engines. It's a really shitty bit of work, but no way I'm paying somebody a hundred US-dollars to do it for me. But when your site gets added to the databases of the major search engines, that's when the fun really starts.

I have a little program called Webalizer which analyzes the stats of my website for me. Among the many charts and graphs and tables Webalizer gives me is a list of terms that the people who found my site via a search engine were looking for. And guess what? Hardly anybody entered the keywords I put in the metatags.

What do you think is the No. 1 search term for this site? Write, author, pulp, translate, fiction? All wrong. The most frequently sought term for this site is in fact the word "knickers". "Huh, what?", you will probably think, "I didn't know that the word "knickers" even appears on this site."

To be honest, neither did I. So I typed the exact word combination (which was "pissy knickers" if you really must know) into Google and found this link to my site. The story contains both the words "pissy" and "knickers", though in totally different contexts. It also contains words like "smelly", "pink" and "high heel". And guess what? All of these words, typed into a search engine in some combination, lead to that page.

At first, I was slightly disturbed by this. I didn't really want people who were obviously looking for porn - pretty kinky porn at that - visiting my site. They wouldn't find what they were looking for anyway. For a while, I even considered taking down the story that had garnered so many unwanted hits. But then I thought, why the hell should I? Did any of the Backstreet Boys fans or Boston Blackie dog breeders ever take down their sites, just because I came there and didn't find what I was looking for? No of course not. So why should I take down something on my site, just because it seems to attract the wrong kind of search engine users?

Of course, all those "dirty" words probably mean that my site is blocked by some of those censorware programs. If they block sites like www.cancer.org just because it contains the word "breast", they probably block this site as well. But that's a topic for another rant.





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