Coming Back for More Or Just Stumbling In?

I doubt if I have any regular readers by now, so I won’t waste a lot of time apologizing for not having written about anything but my iPhone and iPad apps for a long time—or anything at all, for over a month. Not wanting to overdo it on my first blog post not devoted to apps in so long, I will keep this post short. And easy to write, I might add.

This will be another in my series on what brings people to this blog, based on search strings they have used in Google, which I can see in the log for this web site. Previous posts in this vein were “What Brings You Here?”, “More Searchers Arriving at a Place They Never Imagined”, “Some Google Search Examples to Start Off July”, and “More Google Follies.”

It’s gratifying to see indications in a search string that someone has returned to the blog to read something a second time, or perhaps to finish reading a post. I’m going to mention a few of those, which, though they are not as amusing as the ones that show the searcher had something totally different in mind, may be of some interest as indications of the kind of details and words that can stick in a person’s mind sufficiently to serve as keys to finding a blog post. Perhaps the examples will interest a new reader or two in the old posts. As always, I’m keeping the original spelling of the search strings.

Of course, most of the time it’s not possible to know for sure what the Google searcher’s real target was, or if there even was a specific target. I’ll start with one that is far from certain to have been aimed at finding anything on this blog. “Animal fight cat and night creature” isn’t a perfect fit for my blog post “Cries in the Night,” but if you read that post you’ll see why I suspect it might have been meant for it, especially since the searcher did actually come here, or I wouldn’t know about it. It doesn’t seem the sort of phrase one would throw out without something specific in mind.

Just to follow with one I feel more confident about: “mac book pro boil water” fits so well the posts “Vista on My MacBook Pro is Hot—Boiling Hot!”, “Boiling Temperature—Not Just for Vista Anymore”, and “Can’t Boil Water With Vista on My MacBook Pro Anymore” that I’m claiming it as a definite.

I’m inclined to rank as almost definite the search strings “athiest breaking habits” and “Search for dawkins smoking” as having been motivated by a desire to come to my post “On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism.” For all I know Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, has been trying to quit smoking, or perhaps there is another Dawkins associated with smoking in some way. But the referenced post, which talked quite a bit about Dawkins and his stated reasons for rejecting God, has been one of the most read of mine, so my guess is that those strings point to a purposeful search for it.

Also coming to that post was someone who entered the long direct quotation from Dawkins: “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.” Since it was a direct quotation, it could have come from anywhere, but it’s at least a possibility that someone copied it from the blog post mentioned in the preceding paragraph, having been impressed by it there and then wanting to return.

It’s a little disconcerting to see one’s own name in a search string, or it is to me anyway, but my name followed by “on screenscientist isaiah” was used to come to that same blog post on atheism, in which I quoted the Biblical verses Isaiah 55:8-9, so I assume that that text made an impression somehow, just as the Dawkins quote may have. I wonder if it was someone I know?

“Rest in piece roonie” probably was looking for “Ronnie Knox, Rest in Peace,” since the searcher did come here, but I can never know for sure. Kudos to Google’s spell guessing algorithms again.

The Googlers behind either or both of the search strings “drag racing going too fast” and “dragracing providence” could have had in mind “Times I Might Have Died” (the post they arrived at), though it didn’t recount an actual drag race.

Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig” brings people to this blog every day. They are usually looking for advice about what to do with a sick, dying, or dead guinea pig. “Prayer for a dead guinie pig” might fit into the looking-for-advice category, but it could also have been entered by someone wanting to read the piece again, as you will understand if you read it.

It seems interest in my post “Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?” has waned now that the LHC has been running for months without even the whisper of universal annihilation, but I’d like to think that the search string “otto roessler wacky” was inspired by my personal contribution to the defense of the LHC, in which seeing a video of Rössler led me to write “as I viewed his smiling face, this thought came into my mind: I wonder what the German word is for wacky tabacky.”

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