Guaranteed to disappoint

I love sitemeter. Things could be said about me and sitemeter, and it would be hard to deny the most base of them.

I stare with fascination at the little pie charts showing the countries people visit from. I have an occasional visitor (or several?) from a small city wherein lives a friend of mine who doesn't know about my blog, and I weirdly hope that somehow my friend has found my blog and will comment in a way that will make her identity clear, if only to me. (If that's you, hi friend!)

But I'm most filled with wonder by the searches that get people here. I get lots of searchers for paragraph analysis and such. Okay, that makes good sense; I hope my little post actually helps the searcher learn about paragraph analysis. Maybe I can do some good in the world after all!

The other day, though, someone got to my blog from a Google blog search for "sex." Yes, that one word, and apparently, after paging through however many pages (because I paged through several and didn't find myself), that poor reader opened my blog to find a silly joke about metathesis and commentary on reading some Chaucer or Shakespeare. But really, s/he has to have been disappointed, I think.

What's more, this particular searcher was searching from Saudi Arabia. Now, I must admit I have pre-conceptions about what a Saudi might be looking for in a blog with a "sex" search, but I'm pretty sure it's not "The Miller's Tale," if you know what I mean.

More seriously, though, it concerns me that someone was so unsatisfied with a Google blog search using the term "sex" that s/he explored 10 or more pages of links and ended up on mine. Is the blogosphere really that pathetic?

Or maybe s/he should get some help with search terms? I bet you'd hit Pharyngula pretty quickly if you googled "cephalopod sex." Oh, yeah, good stuff there! The take away lesson is that learning effective search strategies will take you to the "information" (or whatever) that you're looking for way more quickly!