Monday, July 30, 2007

Google Semantics Never Disappoint

Most websites use some type of software to analyze their traffic. I use the free version of sitemeter which gives me as much info as I need for now. There are days when it does'nt work very well because the technology on their end is maxed out or having outages. Also, I don't get any info if the visitor has Javascript turned off. But who can blame someone for turning off Javascript? But, like I said my site meter is free. Its sort of like a girlfriend/wife thing. If you don't buy the cow you can only have a bit of milk and no cream.

One of my favourite reports is seeing how visitors were directed (or misdirected) to the site. Sometimes they hit the site directly through a bookmark or by just typing in the url. Sometimes they come in from a link on another blogger's site. Frequently they are directed through the absolute madness of a search engine like Google. Yes, people type in various keywords or phrases and end up right here. From what I've been reading there is a low correlation between what they are looking for and the actual content.

We Canadians are mostly known for our meekness and our tendency to apologize. If you put 3 Canadians in a room and one of them farts the two non-farters will apologize for being present and making the farter feel uncomfortable. Its true. If you have the same scenario but with Americans one person will get sued and two others will never have children. In truth, I think Canadians' constantly apologizing is annoying and possibly pathological.

As a Canadian I feel I ought to be apologizing to people for the fact that Google is very poor with semantics and meta-data. It is impossible for Google to know about context or the varying meanings of a particular word. Supposedly the web is getting smarter with better emerging standards for information tagging.

Here are samples of some key word searches that people used to find this site in the last week:

sherwood park alberta sluts
daryl katz wife
chads pants
new arena in edmonton sketch drawing
edmonton oilers kates purchasing
"mark kingwell" pretentious
nose hill park gay
analysis of birth movie - nicole kidman
bill bixby provides photo that proves elvis is alive
watch movies alone, or don't watch them
insemination proces women videoclip
bush colonoscopy (multiple hits)
shame on me



I didn't include the searches regarding very very very dirty subject matters. Do other bloggers get search hits from people looking for very very very dirty filthy subject matters?

I've decided for this reason to strenuously avoid the use of the word slut in any blog post. So no more discussions of the Blacks. Please recommend this post

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