Web server logs say the funniest things
If you have a website you probably already know about the potential addiction that is checking your visitor logs. Personally I’ve been able to rein in my habit to a couple of times a week for checking the website stats, largely because I’ve got other things to be doing.
For those not familiar with this particular vice, using server logs it’s possible to tell all sorts of things about where your website visitors come from, what they look at when they arrive and how long they stay. Even better Google Analytics gives you pretty graphs, and all for the low price of zero dollars.
Anyway, back to my story. So I was browsing my stats and took a glace through the traffic that was referred to my site by search engines. There at number 10 for this week was a visitor who searched for ‘try to take out a consultant‘. Now I don’t know the context, so I’m not sure if the searcher in that case wanted to ‘take out a consultant’ in a mob sense or maybe just a more benign social way. Neither of those is things I recall writing about recently anyway, so I can only assume that the search continues elsewhere. The person who searched for a definition of ’shaving the yak’ though, them I think I helped.
Mine are often frightening or disturbing, or both. And often have to do with some sort of medical malady. Here are a few good ones I found this month:
“bloody drool and lung cancer”
“my head itches”
“symptoms of swamp butt”
“bare bottom”
“bird poo fight back”
The top one every month is always:
“rose of jericho tattoo”
Rothko
14 May 06 at 9:29 pm
Those are weird indeed, my logs look positively tame in comparison. Either you’re writing about some very personal (and painful) medical conditions there Rothko or the searchers are leaving disappointed.
pdinnen
16 May 06 at 9:43 pm