If you’re a web voyeur, and most of you are, I think you might enjoy this. Click on the picture to the left to view a large enough image to read. This is a partial list of the searches people have entered into Google, or Bing or whatever search engine which has lead them to my blog over the last 30 days. While I get a few regular hits from friends and family, most of my readers come from searches.
Don’t be insulted by the term voyeur. It’s a general term ascribed to people who read blogs, forums, facebook etc. but rarely if ever produce content. Information on this topic I’ve read indicate 90% of participants in basically anything are voyeurs, while another 9% participate – leaving 1% as the original content producers. This (assuming you even believe it) can be mapped to facebook users as well as the typical classroom where there is one teacher, a handful of students who ask questions, and the remaining class sit and listen. It’s the remainder that sit and listen whom are referred to as voyeurs. But the point of the studies I’ve read is that even the voyeurs contribute by means of learning and perhaps later sharing in other forum. So the term is not intended to be derogatory. And there’s a name for this ratio but I forget what it is. Whatever, I may have digressed.
Back to my search results. I am as voyeuristic as anyone. I get such a kick out of reading some of these stats. I don’t know who actually reads my blog because like in facebook readers are anonymous, but I do get some fun stats like these search terms. Because I didn’t capture the entire list above, you won’t see many of the search terms that include the word “porn”. It’s unbelievable what some people are looking for. And they can be so specific. Like “cross country runner porn”. Seriously? Still, other terms are pretty boring. I get a lot of hits on the term “iStock” because I buy many of my pics from that site and the word iStock is in the file name. You might think searches only find blogs that have the term listed in the tags, but search engines actually index the entire web page. Tags are a bit superfluous nowadays. If you’re curious, click on the image and take a peek.