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Category Archives: search strings

Search Strings for Fun and Profit

Interesting searches of the week:
my feeling of brussels: One day, you’ll be able to run a google search to find out how you feel about something.
“national defence” and “information literacy”: I love that these were together in a search. The fact that it’s a search about information literacy tells you that this search was performed [...]

Search Strings: The Return

I haven’t done this in a long while, mostly because I did something to my site that prevented me from being able to access them anymore, and I only recently thought about adding Google Analytics. So now I can see them again! So here we go:
“a diary is an example can you til me is [...]

“Rochelle Needs”

This is a meme wherein you do a google search with “[your name] needs” and see what comes up. Mine:
Rochelle needs to let Michael do nothing, so that Michael can, well, do nothing.
Rochelle needs to be put back into the only loving home she has ever known.
Rochelle needs a 7% swing to become the first [...]

We are not the Lost Generation: Search Strings Redux

I’ve been a bit busy of late. It’s a bit easier to blog regularly when you a) don’t have a full time job, and b) aren’t trying to write a novel. Just my opinion. I’ve been saving the better parts of my brain for work and/or creative (or not so creative) writing, so there’s only [...]

Find me something

It’s time for the search strings redux! And I’ve got a lot of search strings to skim through. I’ve handpicked a few along certain themes, because, as always, my interest is in who people think they’re talking to when confronted with a search engine. Can we tell what’s going on in people’s minds by looking [...]

Search Strings Redux

It’s been a while since I’ve done a thorough expose on my search strings. Things have changed a bit since a) I had catastrophic data loss about three months ago, and b) I’ve moved from Movable Type to WordPress (a move that happened along with a switch from one webhost to another). I’ve partially alleviated [...]

Info Chaos or Virtual Card Catalogue?

Every time I sit down and sort through my running list of search strings that bring folks to my website, I find myself saying the same things over and over again. From my experience collecting and interpreting search strings, it appears that people do not use Google as a search engine in the traditional sense; [...]

My Favourite Search Strings

“are engineers to rigid to be good managers”
The only concession this user made was to remove the question mark. A classic undeconstructed question typed into Google. I love these kinds of search strings because they underscore exactly why the world needs librarians. People don’t think about the process of searching for information; they know what [...]

Search Strings Redux

“how to have a conversation 101″
I like the hopefulness of this query. There’s something very optimistic about the assumption that you’ve tagged the obvious name of a conversational skills website, should such a thing exist, and that this website should of course pop up at the top of your search results list. Are there actually [...]

Pants of Spee

Picking through my stats for the search strings that hit my blog continues to amuse and amaze me. Some of my more recent favourites:
“why am I nervous about everything”
I can just picture this person, which I imagine is a woman, crouching over her computer one evening tapping this frustrated question into Google. There’s something very [...]