January 2, 2005
Looking for Olsen Twins Snow Globes
As it’s the New Year, I thought I’d take a look back over my visitor logs for 2004 to see whether there was anything interesting with regards to browser usage. As it turned out, there were no real shocks, with Internet Explorer 6 remaining top of the pile all year round, and the Gecko browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Firebird) starting the year quite high (26%), then sinking as low as 11%, jumping back up to 25% in September, and then staying around the 20% mark.
If there had been any surprises, be sure that I was fully prepared to share my browser and layout engine usage comparisons, OS usage, and visitor-by-country statistics with you all (the UK topped that one, with the US coming in second - amazing, huh!?!) - it was all more or less how you’d guess.
But then, I had a look at some of the search keyword phrase terms that led to the site, and that was a little bit more interesting - in fact, some of the terms can tell you quite a bit about the searchers themselves….
First up, there’s ‘olsen twins snow globes‘, from February. To paraphrase Loyd Grossman: “Who’d live in a house with Olsen Twins snow globes? David, it’s over to you…”
Unless ‘snow globes‘ is either some crude term for a part of the body, or an insult relating to one’s intelligence, then this poor searcher actually wishes to purchase said objects! It’s disgraceful that an education system actually exists that turns out people in this condition! Listen, if you’re here now, looking for these ‘snow globes‘, then please, call your GP or indeed any doctor, then call a lawyer and take your school to court as soon as possible - remember, help and support is available to everyone.
If you’re already the owner of items such as these, carefully place them into a sturdy box and take them to your local Olsen Twins Rehabilitation Center (or ‘Centre’ if you’re non-US) - they’re in the phone book and they can offer you free disposal and advice regarding legal action.
Also from February, we have ‘how to invade people’s personal space‘. There’s a choice of three possible types of person for this term. Firstly, the shy male: this person has never left the confines of his home but he’s desperate to get near to others (ideally, others of a female variety). He wishes to find out more about undercover ’stealth’ tactics, SAS methodologies, that sort of thing.
Secondly, there’s the guilty loudmouthed extreme- extrovert: this person has eventually realised that when someone tells you, “Piss off outta my face”, it’s not just ‘banter’! I would congratulate this individual for their eventual realisation that a problem exists, but would ask that they not visit my office to thank me!
Finally, and this is the one I’d bet on - the searcher is an alien! This is clearly the most likely as we all know that aliens are never any good at person-to-person interaction, and that they’re always looking to spy on us by invading our bodies (see documentaries such as ‘The Invaders‘, ‘Stargate SG-1‘, ‘Dark Skies‘, amongst others.)
On to March, and we have ‘tiffany amber thiessen e-mail when you write she remember you‘. This one’s tricky. I’m guessing (and it IS only a guess) that someone has contacted Ms Thiessen on more than one occasion, but found that her memories are not what they once were, and now they’re looking for other fans to see whether anyone else has noticed Ms Thiessen’s sudden, seemingly forgetful nature. If this is the case, my advice to this searcher would be to look in the newsgroups as there’s probably lot’s of fans on there.
A couple of others from March are ‘social issues surrounding cd racks‘ (well, neither the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Greeks, nor the Romans had them and look what happened to THEIR societies), and ‘why women are more talkative than men why women are more talkative than men‘ is CLEARLY a search carried out by a woman!
April brings us the concise masculine version of the previous search term - ‘women more words men‘. We also get ‘new logo bt bollocks‘, and this one confuses me a little. Is the searcher looking for pages where there’s a low opinion of the new BT logo, is the searcher describing the new BT logo (possibly viewing it as an example from the Rorschach inkblot test), or is he/she looking for opinions Brian Transeau’s new logo?
July next, and there’s ‘school trousers‘- obviously some Mum looking to get in early before the ‘Back to School‘ marketing campaign kicks in around mid-August.
In August itself, there’s ‘marketing bollocks dictionary‘, presumably from someone at the CBI, and the rather disturbing ‘aki riihilahti nude pics‘ - look, Aki lives at a Crystal Palace so you should have no problems seeing him, just don’t come around here no more asking about him!
As you’re more than likely getting bored with this in-depth, psychological, sociological examination, I’ll wrap up the final ones quickly. We have ‘scrap website design‘ (yeah! let’s scrap it!) and ‘are we being spied on the internet‘ (do you think Google will answer that one TRUTHFULLY!?! Be afraid, my friend, be very afraid…) both from October; ‘kindly give information of how to get my internet explorer to get on other website such as yahoo.com‘ (very polite, but possibly misunderstanding the usage of the term ‘correct protocol‘) from November; and ‘designing for corporate ideals a tyrant‘ (yes, many tyrants now follow modern corporate behaviour so their web sites and other marketing materials should definitely reflect this thinking.)
As you can see, looking at the search terms within a web site’s access logs can potentially tell us a lot about the visitors themselves. On the other hand of course, it could also just be a simple way to waste an hour or so….
Happy New Year!
