This morning there are about 286 results in Google if you search tap-dancing militant islamic fundamentalists. Add quotation marks around the phrase and you end up with 286. (Go ahead, tell me you aren’t tempted to try the search and and see for yourself?) Some, but not many of you, may remember this “search” from the writings of Zay N. Smith who used to write a quirky column called “Quick Takes” for the Chicago Sun-Times, then for WBEZ, and now can be found on a “not so easy to find his writings” website called The Beachwood Reporter (His column may not always be that easy to find – but I highly recommend looking for it). I bring that up is because sometimes Google will send you to weird places or sometimes a site probably that’s not really what you are looking for based on what you search, and as happy as I was for the extra traffic to the web site, I was curious as to the spike in traffic to an old podcast posting when, during an earlier match-up between the Chicago Bears and Dallas Cowboys, all of a sudden our page titled “A Tee Pee, the Chicago Bears, Cowboys & Aliens, a Carnival, and Shooting Up in a Theater!” started getting a lot of visitors. Sure, the page title had “Chicago Bears” and “Cowboys” in it, but as I looked at the stats for the day it appeared people were searching for “Bears pissing on Cowboys” and low and behold there the page was, a #2 rank in Google. As the page didn’t have the word “pissing” in it I can only assume that some magical Google algorithm intertwined “pee” and “piss,” not realizing the “pee” referenced in the article was combined with “tee” so therefore about a tent and not the act of urinating. With that, if you search “Bears peeing on Cowboys,” the page shifts to #1. In the search world I guess that makes sense, and from a quick perusal of the results it didn’t seem there was a page of images of bears urinating on cowboys, but with the mixture of words, our page ranks up at the top!
I suppose the two topics, the Zay N. Smith quest for “tap-dancing militant islamic fundamentalist” Google domination, and “Bears pissing on Cowboys” aren’t directly related, but in trying to figure out the increase in traffic for my website that day, for whatever reason, it triggered that old Smith “search” thought, and I was curious what the count was up to. For what it’s worth, if you do search for Bears pissing on Cowboys, being #2 out of 4,670,000 results isn’t that bad (Add the quotes around it and you only get 6, with this post being one of them). Anyway, if you remember a Google search that didn’t quite take you to that page you were looking for, please share in the comments, but for now I plight: Has a Google search ever led you down the wrong path?
That’s it for this plight! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!