26 May 2005

Dodgy searches

I've just been having a look through the "Referrers" list on my
internet counter. I often check it when I'm bored - it's really
interesting to see where people have come from to find your website.

If you have no idea what I'm on about, you can take a look for
yourself - just scroll down to the bottom of the side bar, and click
on the little bar graph under the site counter (or in laymans' terms,
"the colourful little box under the big box with numbers in it"). A
new window should pop up with loads of statistics about visitors to
the website. Now click on "Referrers" on the left-hand side under
"Visitor Analysis". You should be presented with a breakdown of the
ten most recent visitors, and if they clicked on a link to get to An
Englishman in Nyu-gun, the site they came from will be shown. More
interestingly though, if they used a search engine to to find the
site, the term they were searching for is shown as well.

Most of the people who come to my site through a search engine are
usually looking for something like "nyu gun", "asahi", "fukui", "JET"
or something like that. However, I noticed that one chap (and I'm
going to assume he was a chap) found my site after using this as a
search term:

"naked women firing guns pictures"

Apparently I'm way up there for naked-women-firing-guns-pictures,
since Google threw up my site on the second page of searches, along
with an article on the torture of women in Iraq and a treatise on the
Nanjing Massacre. Oh, and a website called "Alex's Girls With Guns". I
suspect the anonymous visitor found what be was looking for on that
last site, although I suppose there's always the chance that our
friend is a gender studies student looking into gun-related abuses
against women.

Though I doubt it.

Anyway, it seems Google picked my site because of a jokey article I
wrote in December about a magazine called "Arms", which had one of the
trashiest covers I've ever seen - a young Japanese girl with
frightening make-up sprawled under a Kalishnikov. I regret it now - if
I'd know it would be so popular with gender studies students, I
would've written more.

What I like most about the "naked women firing guns pictures" search,
is its exactingly specific nature... The author is no longer content
with merely searching for "naked women", he wants "naked women firing
guns". And what's more, he wants pictures. Presumably a steamy novella
concerning the sensual pleasures enjoyed by naked women who fire guns
would not be enough - this particular client demands pictures, and
nothing less.

A sad day indeed for internet publishers of erotic text-based fiction.

3 comments:

The Funky Drummer said...

I'm not 100% on this - but I think only you can check your stats - as there is a password.

The Funky Drummer said...

I stand corrected.

My previous post is utter bollox.

Anonymous said...

Hey dude, cool site. Though I didn't come here searching for naked shotgun touting babes (honestly).

I did get here through an anonymizer because, please note, the Chinese government is blocking your site...