Who's Looking for What?

Oh, the glories of the sitemeter. It’s not the numbers, but the two tantalizing pieces of information that they come with: the city and country of the visitor matched to the words they searched or a referring site. But I particularly like the words searched. It’s such connective tissue between blog writer and reader. It’s a little glimpse into another life somewhere in the big world at a specific moment in time when that mind was looking for something.

Here are some interesting searches that brought people here from interesting places:

1. Chahar Mahall va Bakhatiari, Iran
"17 century comment on "the definition of love" by andrew marvell"

It’s surprising to me when anyone is looking for a quote from a metaphysical poet; I’ll admit it’s a little more surprising when that person is in Iran.


2. Kinshasa, The Democratic Republic of the Congo
“Verbum caro factum est”

This was part of a Christmas post, and it was lovely to see the page translated into French

3. Istanbul, Turkey
“Thomas Hardy Immanent will”

The poet of Dorset and his sense of fate is world literature at its best

4. Managua, Nicaragua
“Realm and conquest”

Michael Clayton’s own fiction is very popular

5. Moscow City, Moscow &
Worcester, Worcestershire

“Strange case of the missing corpse”

This is a fairly obscure piece of The Avengers series, a promo created for when the show came to the USA in color. True fans know no geographical boundaries.

My favorite:

6. Shanghai, China
“Where does don draper live?”

The lure of those wacky madmen is universal

and now my second favorite:

7. Doha, Qatar
george clooney's spine


These searches are a good mix of serious literature and pop culture, which I like to think captures the character of this tiny spec on the blogsphere.

But I should also note that the search words that have drawn the most traffic--at literally 4 times more than the second most popular search words, are:

"How to create a Simpson avatar."

D'oh.

 Mapeel     6/14/2008     blogs