The Peculiar Allure of Blog Search Terms

Like most blogging platforms WordPress provides statistics on blog views: unique visitors, referring pages, and most interestingly search terms that bring viewers here.  The following, for instance, are yesterday’s entries for this blog:

a municipal report what is the narrator’s attitude toward the south



failure of kindness



www american horror story season 3 walking dead



is it better for a jewish boy to be atheist or christian?



why i’m a pakistani first and punjabi second



what to put on professor door



brave announcement



bruce springsteen new york times op ed



nietzsche walter white



martin buber adolf eichmann

(A little game that may be played almost instantly on reading such a list is to try to guess which posts my visitors would have been directed to via the terms above. In the case of the list above, I can guess correctly in each case.)

I am not the first blogger to note that search terms are fascinating. On her blog, Elke Stangl has an entire series of interesting posts on search term, spam and error message ‘poetry’. Here is an interesting entry in her oeuvre:

spam poets

write weird things for search terms

crowdsourcing next level

work hard play hard

post modern art

narrating events

text editor blank sheet paper

gay steampunk costumes

a theory about nostalgia

theory of poetry satire

to flush the toilet

how do an gyroscope work? magic?

spinning top with helium balloon

gyroscope not falling over

patent perpetuum mobile

controlling the elements

cliche physics problems

gyroscopes are magic

zen engineering

subversive element

42 divided by 3

retro geek

how to combine theory with practice in physics

microwave oven radiation wavelength holes

40 below summer fire at zero gravity

can mice get into microwave oven

dead mice in the microwave

microwave oven theory

physics isn’t intuitive

pseudoscience

Our fascinated engagement with search terms is triggered by a variety of factors. Sometimes it is just the  fractured syntax, an inevitable byproduct of the urge to be efficient in the framing of the search; sometimes it is the giggle-inducing revelation that your blog contains material that brings porn-seekers to it, which also serves as a reminder of how parental and governmental confidence in porn filters is misplaced; sometimes it is the glimpse provided of the anxious student–whether high-school or college–seeking online help with a writing assignment;  sometimes the idiosyncratic connections made visible–as in the ‘nietzsche walter white’ exhibit above.

Most of all though, search terms are a glimpse of the hive mind of the ‘Net: a peek at the bubbling activity of the teeming millions that interact with it on a daily basis, seeking entertainment, amusement, edification, gratification, employment.  They make visible the anxiety of the questions that torment some and the curiosity–sometimes prurient, sometimes not–that drives others; they remind us of the many different functions that this gigantic interconnected network of networks and protocols plays in our lives, of the indispensability it has acquired.

They reassure us too, that perhaps even something quite as humble as a search term that we type into a search engine may amuse and edify someone, someday.