Odd things people search for

This is actually not much of a movie related post. In fact it's more about this blog and how some people stumble upon it. About a month ago I added a tracker to the blog, so I could get some vague sense of whether or not (and whoever or not) was reading it.

Now I didn't expect thousands of people a day flocking to the blog, and good thing too because it ain't happening. Really, unless you know about it, you're probably not going to find it. Unless you search for: homemade monkey bars galvanized or even blind "contact lenses" halloween actress.

There hasn't been too many odd searches, but a few, such as demon footage, backup tape monkey and demon footwear. The others have been for some things only a little peculiar, rodeo props (???), warhammer prop and (twice this popped up) bile demon. In all fairness to the folks searching for Bile Demons, they were characters from a video game called Dungeon Master. And oddly enough the Bile Demons from the game resemble Pyre (big, fat, and orange) more then they do my Bile Demons. And it's actually where I got the inspiration for the name.

There was also iceposter canvas (referring to the place where I got my posters done) and firestore fs-4hd (the digital storage drive I use) and homemade steadicam (which reminds me I should put a link to the place where I got the info to build mine). And that was more or less the extent of it...except.

Now, I don't want to creep anyone out with letting you know this, but 4 other searches that led folks to my blog were women's names. I will point out now that they were all from the UK or nearby, so chances are it wasn't anyone any of you know searching for you on the net. I don't want to name names - since it's obviously not the folks involved in my movie they were actually looking for I'd say.

I also don't want to give anyone the impression that it's that easy to track people's net surfing habits. Well, it kind of is, but the only info is an IP address and a referrer. By referrer I mean whether it was a search engine (and what search words were used) or what website if any. Some IPs aren't static, I guess dynamic IP is the right term? I'm not sure, in any case it just means your IP isn't always the same so you couldn't really track and IP address and tell exactly whose it was - at least I can't, someone else might though I suppose.

Still, it's all kind of weird knowing that all these people who have no idea what the hell this movie is have stumbled upon my blog. Quite a few are scattered over Europe, including 2 from Singapore and 1 from Instanbul, the bulk come from Canada, supposedly on 3 from PEI though. So obviously it's not that easy to track specifically where an IP comes from, I guess because Aliant is all over, sometimes it guesses the address come from Nova Scotia, unless that 18 people from NS know about the movie. I doubt it.

The numbers I have so far are about 181 pages viewed in the last month. Good thing I don't expect to make money from this blog. Most folks are using Firefox 2.0 as their browser and 1 person out there is still using Win98.

Anyway, that's it really. I thought it was interesting, perhaps it's not. Why knows. In any case, if you got a website or blog or whatever and want to keep track of it. http://www.histats.com/ That's where mine came from. It's free, doesn't seem to bog down the site or anything.

And if you want to see what kind of info can be found from just your IP address, check this out: http://ip-lookup.net/ It also allows you to look up info on other IP addresses.

If you're suddenly paranoid about that fact that someone out there can tell you searched for "Mistress SpanksAlot", remember that there's probably a couple thousand other folks doing the same and much, much worse.