Like most of us (I refuse to believe I'm the only one), I get a kick out of looking at my referral stats here on Typepad. I find it fascinating to see some of the wild things people search on that bring them to me, although I don't get the weirdos that Kathy Flake gets, or the animal haters Gina Spadafori gets.
In the beginning, most of the search engine traffic found my blog searching on terms about dog diet, ending up at Of Carnivores, Omnivores, Teeth, and Science, which was included in a compilation of blog writing on science, natural history, and medicine known as The Tangled Bank, or Picking the Bones of the Raw Diet Debate, my post on the politics of dog food that amazingly made it as a finalist in the 2004 Koufax Awards. I had a smattering of searches for DFA, Howard Dean, and Jon Stewart that came up pretty often, but the dog stuff far outweighed the political stuff. Which was fine with me - part of my motivation for starting the blog was to politicize the dog people I knew. (That's a joke, Gil.)
But lately I've noticed something interesting, and unless there is another explanation for why this is happening, one of the top search terms people are using to find my blog is "Dogged Blog." This makes me so happy that, if you do in fact know of a reason why this trend has nothing to do with my blog, please don't tell me.
My favorite thing to find when I check the stats, though, is that I've been added to someone's blogroll or linked to. I had 1600 hits in a few hours from Crooks and Liars the other day, with a few hundred more from "a blog with homosexual tendencies" called Towleroad, to my post A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Flaming Outrage.
Even though I can't compete with Gina and Kathy, I do get some weird ones now and then and wonder just how incredibly disappointed some of these people are going to be when they get here. I mean, the guy who googled "head up elephant butt" and ended up at More Media Head-Up-Butt Problems - what was he thinking?
That was a rhetorical question, I REALLY don't want to know.
Funny thing is, I googled "homemade dog food" type searches all during January, but never found your site. I reached it through the Koufax awards about the time I'd given up on the internet forking over any good information.
Another weird thing: I came up 3rd on some poor dear's search for "2005 British election issues" the other day, which is just bollocks. I'm muddling my way through the issues myself!
Posted by: KathyF | 02 May 2005 at 11:22 AM