There's been a lot of discussion in my classes about the way people nowadays simply type words in a text box (any box will do) and expect to get results. I think this must be even truer than I previously believed, because I looked at my MT activity log today and saw queries like this:
- Astragalus membrabaceus root extract
- le bonheur est dans le pré
- cooking octopus
- millionaires per capita
- If it's decent, existing vendors like VTLS
None of which, I believe, match anything in my blog. Mind you, these are queries people submitted to search on my blog, not queries on Google that led them here (although those can be quite strange too). What explanation can there be for these bizarre queries? I am completely befuddled. I think they must have though that my box labeled Search
would search the whole Web, because why would they have thought I had written about medicinal herbs and many-limbed aquatic creatures? (On the other hand, I have a good idea of where to find the statistic of how many millionaires there are per capita!)
mademoiselle a. says:
I just found your weblog through...a seach engine [needed information on DTS agent ban]. I like the first impression, a nice place!
I's true for the strange searches; as for google, there is, or was, a silly game to enter the weirdest search string and "beat" google in that it couldn't deliver a result.
mademoiselle a. says:
Excuse this second comment - just to verify: I have no spam intentions ;)
Laurabelle says:
Oh, I know — my filter is dumb. If you notice, all the recent comments are supposedly spam. I just haven't gotten enough comments (spam or otherwise) to train it properly. In fact, I probably never will get it properly trained, but I'm trying anyway.
Laurabelle says:
Oh, it's easy enough to find queries that won't deliver any results. The challenge is to find a combination of keywords that will return only one result. This is called a Googlewhack!
mademoiselle a. says:
I confused games. I meant that. Duh me....