What People Search for Online

May 8, 2006

Internet users were perturbed to hear that information on web searches had been turned over to the US government by almost all the major search engines (e.g., Yahoo and MSN), though Google put up a fight. The government said they were looking for evidence that pornography is easily available to children on the Internet. Well, duh. Park any 12-year-old in front of a computer and you'll find that out quickly enough.

I keep a close eye on the statistics for my website, including the search terms that bring people to me. Because my site is so weird and eclectic, and occasionally includes those dirty words that people search for, I get traffic from some very creepy searches. Presumably those people don't find what they were looking for on my site (that would be even more disturbing), but I wish I didn't know what kinds of searches are going on out there.

It's surprising, the amount of information that a webmaster collects about her visitors without even trying. I noticed one day that more than 100 pages on my site had been viewed from the Internet address of a law firm. A few days later, someone wrote to me from an email address at the same firm, asking to subscribe to my newsletter. "Glad to," I replied. "I guess that was you looking at my site the other day?" I didn't mean to be intrusive, but I think that unnerved her...

Recently I noticed in my web stats report that someone had searched for "call girl India address." I had a look at the raw logs, and there it was, very first item. I hadn't realized that the log tells me not only what term was searched for and what search engine the request came from, but the IP address (numeric web address) from which the search was run. In other words, if you are web surfing from your company Internet connection and end up on my site, even via a search, I know where you came from and what you were looking for. In this particular case, the IP address belonged to a company based in the Middle East. I guess someone's going on a business trip to India and wants to make sure he can locate, ahem, a full range of services.

From time to time even creepier stuff turns up. One startling search phrase that I've seen several times is "family that f***s together." The page they're finding is an article titled The Family That Eats Together, but the F-word is in there as well. I don't think I want to know what they were actually looking for...