The Internet is Dumb

The internet is really a funny thing. It’s easily the most important technological development of the 20th century, and most of the time it doesn’t even make sense.

Take Friendster for example. A simple web site, that any computer science major worth his or her salt could make, with reliability worse than a Yugo, and it’s still the darling of the socialite web site scene.

Or take the Sponge Monkeys. Do you know the Sponge Monkeys? They’re site-mates of the Punk Rock Kittens. Take a look at them. They’re stupid. And by stupid, I mean hilarious, but really stupid. And you know what? I saw them in a Quizno’s commerical last night, complete with crazy lyrics and those shifty eyes. Quizno’s! A world-wide company, and they have the freakin’ Sponge Monkeys singing songs in their commercials. Why? Beacuse the internet is dumb.

Fast forward to today.

“Hey Shri, I have a mystery I need you to help me solve. The traffic on my web site tripled last month, and I don’t know what’s going on.”

Shriram is always up for a challenge, so I fired up the web stats web page, and we started trying to figure out what was going on. Turns out half of my hits are coming from sites related to image searching sites at Google like images.google.com, images.google.ca, images.google.de, images.google.nl. DanK stolled in, and we caught him up on what was going on.

“Maybe it’s because you have porn.”

Yes Dan. Must be all that porn.

So we went to my blog and looked for interesting pictures. Nothing too interesting. The traffic spiked happened in mid-January so it must have been before then. What could people be searching for that they are finding on my site? We tried the puppies, we tried the mustache, and my site never came up. There must be some word or words that people are searching for, that brings up my site. What the heck is going on?

And then Shri had a great idea as he always does.

“Why don’t you try seeing all the pictures that Google knows about on your blog.”

So I did. And after looking at all the pictures we found the one. The one that if you search for the exact right word, Google will put my site above all of the billions of other pages out there.

Google search for images on markphillip.com

I’ll post the answer tomorrow.