What if the fire alarm beeps infrequently?
I don’t check the traffic stats for this site often, maybe once every six months. If I were trying to make money here I might care a little more, but since most of Prepoceros is me watching myself type . . . meh. I did pull them up a few days ago to write the NaBlo recap and was reminded of my favorite type of web statistics: search terms! Folks have found their way here on the hunt for all sorts of wacky things. Shall I share?
We’ll start with the mundane and move toward unfathomability. By far the most popular phrase that brings people to Prepoceros is “GRE percentiles,” which I assume leads them to these posts. Popular variations on this theme include “GRE percentile curve,” “how to know GRE percentiles,” and “GRE quantitative 800.” I also get a good number of hits from people searching for information on the LSAT, like “what to eat the morning of the LSAT” and “why is the LSAT so damned hard?” and a few more from people searching for SAT or ISEE information.
People have also found me by searching on my full name, or on my name plus some identifying information, as in “natalie lastname harvey mudd” or, recently, “natalie lastname houston blog.” I don’t have a firm policy on how searchable I’d like to be. My thoughts on that topic are rambly and best saved for another post*.
I think occasionally people who come here via search engine might actually have found what they were looking for, and that warms my heart a little . . . connectedness and all that. Each of the following is a search term about which something useful—lists, discussion, or maybe a link—can be found on my site. (Pssst! Search bar, top right.)
puppy nicknames
adjectives ending in ly
rhymes with junk
footie pajamas for grown ups
words that tickle the tongue
jejune definition
pictures of hurricane rita from texas
cherry preserves houston nutcracker market
hold our slide rules high
plural for starbucks
my axiom of choice you know it’s true
veere middelburg
Then there are the phrases which *might* have hit their intended targets, but it’s hard to say what the folks behind these were thinking. Want to read the archives, but don’t have hours to spare? Here’s a twenty-second highlight reel of the last eighteen months of my life:
hate tvmax
death obsession
overcooked pasta
flea bomb didn’t work
tomorrow’s going to suck
severe butt bruise
teaching lsat
astroporn
classical studies
something happen to my brain
shit i need to go to bed
One surprisingly common phrase has been “eager to please synonym,” a reference to this post. I DON’T KNOW EITHER, PEOPLE. But do let me know if you find a good one, thanks.
Here are some phrases I remember referencing, but which I’m fairly certain this site contains no useful information about:
swankie blankie
collapsible hamper
leta armstrong
floating cinema
glass menagerie jonquil
pas de drapeau pas de pays
22 degree halo
And finally, the most entertaining category: the WTFs. Today’s title is taken from this group. Reading through these brings up so many questions, like “How many pages of ‘fisting’ results did you have to flip through to get to my link?” and “When did I ever say ‘bongoballs’?” I could search for these things myself, I suppose, but I prefer to preserve the sense of mystery.
barbie jet
wowdy woo
anodyne machine [I don't even know what this is]
video clips of whole severe thunderstorms going over
ancient dildo
how electricity runs through dvds
take apart put back together working
good traction shoes [I *wish* I had some of those to write about]
words that mean something else [something besides . . . what they mean?]
shameless sexgirls
myspace and modern dance dance and layout
petsmart groomers killed my dog [two similar searches -- this has happened more than once? More than NEVER?]
what will happen if my dog ate 24 ibuprofen
stuffed moose for wax dipping
me naked highschool [sorry to disappoint]
animated weather in bulgaria
essays on walnut cookies
So there you have it. By typing those in, I’ve now guaranteed that the next person looking for a stuffed moose for wax dipping will come here FIRST. Hello, weird moose candle person!
Since I can’t think of a way to conclude this post, I’ll shoot off in a tangential direction and mention that for some reason I’ve suddenly remembered my dream from this morning. In one vivid scene, I was Britney Spears, and I was taking a huge dump in a tiny office. The rest of it was actually rather nightmarish — part of the time I was in Jennifer Aniston’s body, I think, in a fabulous dress, which was nice, but I was desperately running from some horrible people who wanted me for a crime I hadn’t committed. I nearly drowned several times and barely escaped being crushed by the pieces of a very complicated elevator. I tried to hide in the locker room of a public pool, but I didn’t have the right color towel, so they spotted me right away. And the worst of it is that you stopped caring several sentences ago. Good night.
———
* I removed my last name from the “about” page here a few months ago**, but there are still a few old comments lying around signed with my full name and linked here. I could ask the owners of those blogs to edit my comments, but I haven’t decided I want to be that anal about it yet.
** . . . and five minutes ago I got the bright idea to search my own site and turned up another reference I hadn’t noticed, in an old post. D’oh.
December 9th, 2006 at 3:14 am
You might have been a celebrity (twice over), but in my dream I got to be little ol me. With Anderson Cooper’s personal cell phone number. I’m not quite sure how I achieved that one, but I called him up to report a suspicious looking vehicle that turned out to have dead bodies in the trunk.
December 9th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
You had Anderson’s number?! Dream-you needs to get in touch with dream-me and hook me up with those digits.
December 10th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
I was looking at you tube and there was this video conversation, I guess, where people videotaped themselves talking about sarcasm.
So I found this blog and you are now talking about tags – what people call META, which is another word for what people are really talking about when they dont have anything to say, on the face of it.
Apparently people are comunicating through the youtube in ways that need to be studied. But I have to “demo” some drywall right now, so I’ll leave that to the academics.
December 12th, 2006 at 1:20 am
Glad to see someone else gets the random keyword google factor- somebody got ot me recently through soviet tractor production which I’ve never written about.