Give the People What They Want

One of the nice things about the move to ScienceBlogs is that I gained access to a much better stats package than we had for Steelypips. In particular, I can now look at the keywords that bring people to my site (for steelypips, I could only get keywords for the domain as a whole, which meant that my blog traffic was swamped by Kate's NetHack site.

On ScienceBlogs, though, I can easily find the odd search queries that have brought people to the site. Which is both depressing (the #4 result is "pharyngula," which really puts things in perspective...), and sort of interesting ("deep attachment to local realism" comes in at #6).

The oddest phrase to consistently turn up, though, is "Jim Boeheim's wife." Or, in one case, "Jim Boeheim's hot wife." This is sort of disturbing, as I really don't have much to offer on the topic of Jim Boeheim's wife-- really, the only time I've used that phrase is in talking about what an asshat Dick Vitale is, as in "I really wish he'd talk about the game he's being paid to cover, and not keep going off about Jim Boeheim's wife." It's really tacky and inappropriate for Vitale to keep blathering on about how attractive she is.

But, I'm a slave to public opinion, so, for you weird search engine monkeys out there, here's a link to the New York Times talking about Jim Boeheim's wife. And the wives of other coaches.

Happily, the games are back today, so they Times will have real sports stories to report in the near future. There will not be a return of NCAA live-blogging, though, as that appears to be the proximate cause of my shoulder problems.

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I love the search statistics, too. The most popular searches that bring folks to my site in the past couple of months have been Paksenarrion related, which is interesting. I had no idea that was hot at the moment, and am still not sure why it is. Aside from that, I get lots of people looking for pictures of a Toyota Avensis or Skyline GTR, and various other keywords related to my Scotland pictures. Then there's the odd yahoo looking for an MP3 because of our music reviews. It's just a fun thing to guage how people find your site useful.

How about this as a search query:

"How much money did Barry J. Marshall earn via a Nobel for what he did to himself and his family?"

Some dude/dudette ended up visiting my blog through this search. Seriously.

I still don't know the answer to that question ...