You were looking for WHAT?

One useful feature of the my blogging software tells me what people were looking for when Google or other search engines bring them to my site. Interestingly enough, it's often not the Technorati tags I carefully insert at the bottom of each posting that bring people here. Most of the time people are looking for the oddest things, and, I am convinced, are generally rather surprised that this is where their searches bring them.

Of course every time I use the word yoni in a posting, I get what must be a lot of horny teenage boys trolling for pornography. I bet they're surprised when they are directed to the posting I made about teaching the yoni self-portrait class at Pantheacon, or to my Sheela-na-gig quilt series.

A posting I once did after seeing a huge open-pit copper mine in Arizona seems to bring a lot of afficinados of dragline excavators.  And periodically, I get a big rush of hits for a posting I once made about cotton growers' impact on Califiornia's environment in which I mentioned the J.G. Boswell Company.

I've written serveral times about the Pentacle Quest, which was the Pagan community's battle with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs over the use of our religious symbol on military members' tombstones. I wonder if some of the many hits I get after one of these postings are simply people looking for more information about veterans' benefits.

Whenever I write about my garden, I try to use scientific names for the plants because the common names vary in different parts of the country. I bet I've received several thousand hits for a posting I did about one of my favorite shrubs, the bronze-leafed pink-flowering Loropetalum chinensis. And, judging from the hits I receive every time I mention the Lobelia cardinalis, the world must be filled with fanciers of this somewhat temperamental bog plant with brilliant red flowers. On the other hand, despite the fact that I love poppies and both photograph and write about them often, very few poppy fans land here regardless of whether they're searching for members of the Papaver family or Eschscholzia californica (California poppies).

I've written a few times about my Norwegian immigrant ancestors, and whenever I do, I receive hits galore from a wide range of genealogy serchers. So far my blog hasn't been found by any previously unknown family members, or if they have, they haven't told me.  But it does seem as if a very large hunk of the American population has at least a little bit of Norwegian ancestry, if the queries that hit my blog are any indication.

GIven the high number of hits I get on my name alone, I would suspect that many of the sources or people I've written about in my long journalistic career have Googled me and been surprised to end up here. I have mentioned patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other aspects of intellectual-property law  in passing, but, although they've been the primary focus of my professional life, they're not receiving much emphasis in my blog.

And certainly people who are searching for more information about Audhumla, the primal cow found in Norse mythology, end up here. I wonder how disappointed they are when they learn the Audhumla of this blog's title is my Ford Taurus. Here's a drawing of the mythic Audhumla that's in the collection of Iceland's Árni Magnússon Institute followed by a photo of my silver Audhumla taken on one of our many road trips. (And yes, Audhumla is entitled to park in a handicapped slot). 

Here I write about things that momentarily draw my attention. And often I write about a person, place or an idea to clarify my own thinking. I often don't know what I really think about something until the words come out the ends of my fingers to the computer keyboard and onto this blog site.  So in one week you may read about gardening, textile art, farmers markets, Paganism, immigration, ballet, English loan words in Japanese,  Norwgian culture, or even the best book I read that week. Which, incidentally, this week is a naturalistic novel set in Chicago in the late 1930s. The book, Knock on Any Door, was written by African-American novelist Willard Motley. It's the story of the corruption of an Italian-American boy, who was so beaten and beaten down by society that he ends up in the electric chair, a classic tough-guy in the James Cagney mode. (In 1949, the book was made into a movie by the same name starring Humphrey Bogart and John Derek).

It's curious that Motley, who was once associated with Chicago's social-reformer Hull House, never wrote about African-American characters. After all, he was writing at the same time as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, all of whom drew heavily on the mid-century African-American experience.

garden gardening Google Technorati search search+engine genealogy yoni genealogical immigrant Norway Norwegian Pagan Paganism Norse mythology African-American literature

   

Comments

[Anne Hill]

My favorite search string that led people to my site was several people searching for Spring drinks. My kind of people!

[Sheilabythebeach]

I think I learned more about how to drive people to my blog by reading this post than anything on Google! Keep on making those pots too!