Neomeme

Warning: This is a blog post about this blog. Here is the FAQ for such posts:

Q: Could the blog author get any more narciccistic and self-aggrandizing?

A: Yes. That’s what posts after a Digg front-page story are for.

Now, with that out of the way, the actual post:

Now that this blog has gotten enough incoming links (Thanks Lifehacker and ProBlogger! ), I’m beginning to see organic search traffic, mainly from Google, where neomeme is ranked surprisingly high for certain somewhat competitive search terms. The Google gods smile upon me. But, aside from queries relevant to the content of the blog, this blog is mysteriouslyranked highly for rather…different combinations of words. Certainly not nearly as amusing as the AOL Search Database, but still mildly amusing. And so, recent searches where this blog not only showed up high in search results, but also clicked on the results, hoping to find what they are looking for here.

And so, a few search terms people used to come to neomeme:

• green lantern superhero official website neomeme is ranked 14th for this phrase, due to Why Is Everyone the Green Lantern. As it turns out, the Green Lantern doesn’t even HAVE an official website. Guess a minor 50’s superhero without a modern cinematic re-imaginining official websites are relegated to blog posts about blogging. The number 3 result is Steve Rubel revealing Green Lantern’s true identity to be Jason Calcanis.
• create a Trojan to find username and password. neomeme is ranked 23, because of all of the ideas on generating passwords that can defeat trojans. Sorry 1337 haxxor, you won’t be finding any such things here.
• virtual people love Amazingly, neomeme is #2 for virtual people love, thanks to my philoso-techno-babble on the possbililty of AI bots displacing humans in online worlds without anyone noticing. Unfortunately for this guy, and for the other intrepid Don Juan looking for the even more disturbing term people for virtual love, they will find nothing more than unarousing discourse.
• Finally, my favorite: tricks to get high. The other queries were at least tangentially related to the posts I had written. This one puzzled me. Amazingly, my Dirty Tricks to Get Dugg article is #11 for that query, just because I used the word “high” somewhere in the story(Context: “kick into high gear”). Allright, for you aspiring stoners I will widen the scope of this blog and impart the secret of getting high upon you. Here’s the trick to get high: Do drugs. That’s all you need, really. No tricks required.

I don’t know who to blame for such misunderstandings, stupid searchers or stupid Google algorithms. I’m not complaining. Any traffic is good traffic. Or something like that.
This small and very unscientific sample also confirms a suspicion I had about searches- most people don’t know how to use search engines properly, and use natural language searches. A look at more data confirms that a lot of people do this. That is, they ask questions, like “What is…” or “How do I…” . These of course are completely useless to searching because search engines like Google completely ignore such common words(A search with and without the “what is” returns the same result, and Google does not even highlight the common word). Also, searching for “what is” is simply illogical, as websites that answer questions rarely include the question in the content. For example, the Wikipedia article on “Elephant” does not have the exact text “What is an elephant?” anywhere in the article. It would be illogical to do so. And yet, less computer literate users continue to search using “what is”, not realizing that search engines search only the direct text of the article, and are not, in fact, magical genies who can answer any question(although Google, undoubtedly aware of this phenomenon, is making strides in that direction with simple geographical and biographical facts, and ask.com has been trying this for years, with little success, answering a very limited range of questions). For some reason, this phenomenon is present only in web searches. You will never see Bill from Accounting typing “Where is the annual report I was working on yesterday?”, although you might see him sneaking off a Google search for “virtual people love” during his lunch break.Until incredibly advanced AI is developed, natural language search will remain a pipe dream. But the general public learning to use search properly will always be far more implausible.