One of the better parts of running your own website is getting to look over your logs at the obscure technical details that are recorded over time about any website. The best part of this is seeing what search terms people are using to find your website. Note that in order for a search to show up as a hit on my site, someone has to not only search for the term, but follow a link on the search results to my page.

Of course, I get my fair share of space+ninja and hatelife searches, as well as several like online+portfolio or php+directory+browser.

Going back, I find some suprises in the logs, though. In November, I got a single hit for matrics+ninja, which has an entry in my blog for the second Google result. I’m guessing the guy was looking for “matrix ninja” and was somewhat disappointed to find that my blog didn’t contain either.

Also in November, I got a search result for dsl+setup+problems+qwest, which turns one of my blog entries complaining about Qwest. I can’t tell you how proud I am of this.

Something that shows up as the number-one search term every month is simple to explain: gullivera. On the second page of google results, there’s a link to an old text document I posted that some buddies of mine wrote in high school. It’s crude, mostly potty humor, and must be terribly disappointing to people searching for the erotica comic by Milo Manara. Incidentally, this (the story, not the erotica) is the story where I took the name “Obeso the Pirate” from, and also my World of Warcraft name, Irko (for Irko the Irritable). I generally get between 50-75 search hits for this a month. The power of porn!

Another suprise is that I always have 2 or 3 variations on mcdonnell+douglas+sp80+jet, which turns up a blog entry where I mentioned the type of plane I was going to be flying on. The fact that I’m in the top 10 search results for this goes to show just how thrilling the field of plane-spotting must be on the internet. (12 hits in December for this spelling variation, about twice that for derivations).

I also generally get 5 or 6 hits for dealing+with+jerks. But they’re not finding any self-help articles here, it’s a link to an old text file on an archived copy of my old home page. I’m on the top-ten for this search also, but that’s got more to do with the page having the same URL for several years than anything else.

A personal favorite is zombie+infection+simulator , which finds a blog entry where I linked to the excellent simulator in question. The simulator rightly has the top search result on google, and hopefully those 5 or 6 hits every month manage to follow my link to the real simulator.

This month brought something new. I’ve already got 7 hits for parkour+videos. After going through the first five pages of Google results, I’m unable to find the one that links to me, so whoever followed this link 7 times must have been getting desperate, or it was Miles looking for an old blog entry he made. Both seem equally likely.

And finally, I have to apologize to the person or persons who searched 6 times this month for postman's+creed, only to find a google link in the top 10 results for a comment Ryan left on a post with an altered version of the creed. I hope that wherever you are, you don’t actually think that your mailman is dodging asteroids and space pirates.