Jews, Muslims, black magic & pornography

One of the less obvious advantages of maintaining a blog or any other website is getting to psychoanalyze your visitors (albeit anonymously).

In the Information Technology business, this is know as  "web traffic
analysis" or "search engine optimization" (the two areas are slightly different, but related).  While web servers cannot tell who its visitors are–they don’t know visitors’ identities or email addresses–they do log generic
information about visitors.  A variety of mostly excruciatingly dull
information is gathered about visitors’ computer configuration (brower type,
screen resolution, operating system, …) and Internet connection (the ISP involved, the location of the ISP, …).

The most interesting data concerns  the "Referrer Page", which is the page
that led them to your website. If Website A has a link to Website B, when
visitors arrive from Website B, Website B’s webserver log lists Website A as a
referrer.  If someone manually types in a URL, the referrer entry is blank for that visit.

Where this gets interesting is when visitors arrive from search engines. 
If a person does a search in Google for "hall of fame" and clicks on a link for
SportsIllustrated.com, the SportsIllustrated.com’s web server log shows that
somebody was referred to them by a Google search for "hall of fame".

Search engine queries provide a fascinating window into the Internet’s Id (as
in Id, Ego, & Super-Ego).  The most fortuitous and sometimes truly bizarre
web searches result in visits from complete strangers.

For example, one theologically inclined person did a search in Google for

"muslims believe in eternal damnation" and came to my blog (which no longer appears in the search results, probably because newer pages have more of the keywords than my blog). 

Another, presumably rather eccentric, individual
stumbled upon my blog after searching for

"jews spreading pornography muslims" on MSN.com (this link still works,
btw).  I’m not making that up (see for yourself). 

Yet another person looked for "’michael moore’ conspiracy patriots rams" in MSN and my blog came up as the first result.

Still, my wife Shabana’s blog, Koonj,
gets infinitely more entertaining search engine referrals, probably
because she writes about a much wider range of topics than I do and thus includes a veritable cornucopia of unexpected keywords to attract the attention of search engines.

For example, she regularly gets visitors looking for

"kalla jadu" (black magic in Urdu) because one of her postings mentions such beliefs. 

Then there’s the time where som guy (or perhaps his wife) searched for

"impotence halwa" and came across her
tribute to
a famous Pakistani desert maker.

The all-time best one, though, has to be this one

"i want read sexy stories in urdu language" sent somebody to her
posting on
Wikipedia’s entry on Urdu (scroll down to "Wikipedia on Urdu"). .

The the truly scary thing is that with the exception of the "jews spreading
pornograpy muslims" search–which lists my blog on the first page of
results–all of these searches require that the person involved click "Next"
many times.  In other words, in each case someone was sifting through long lists of
search results before they came across my blog.  Why anybody would read page after page of these numbingly dull search results, I have no idea.

Talk about having too much time on your hands.  Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about my own Internet habit.

Update #1 (10/7/2005): 
Due to this particular entry, someone recently arrived at my blog after doing a search for "urdu sexy" (half way down the page) on MSN.com.  I kinda like that, though I’d prefer "gora sexy".

Again, I don’t know why someone would search for such random keywords.  (No offense to my muhajir  friends out there, but strictly speaking shouldn’t it if anything be "punjabi sexy"?)

Update #2  (10/15/2005) :
Now I’m getting hits for  "hindi sexy stories", which demonstrates that AltaVista treats translates "Hindi" into "Urdu", as well, for keyword searches. 

Just for fun, I’m going expand my repetoire and add new phrases:

Arabic sexy stories, Siraiki sexy stories, French sexy stories, Punjabi sexy stories, Persian sexy stories, Turkish sexy stories, Malay sexy stories, Hausa sexy stories, Swahili sexy stories, Dari sexy stories, Kurdish sexy stories, Hmong sexy stories, Wolof sexy stories, Berber sexy stories, Tamil sexy stories, Hinko sexy stories, Sinhalese sexy stories, Uyghur sexy stories, Tagalog sexy stories,  Baluchi sexy stories, Punjabi sexy stories, Kashmiri sexy stories, Gujarati sexy stories, Sindi sexy stories,  …

Oh, and while I’m at it:

sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sexsex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex

There.  Now I’ve set up what’s called a honey pot by Internet security professionals, except that instead of luring in hackers or viruses, I’m summoning the naughty  (and presumably mostly Muslim, given my choice of languages) surfers of the universe.

That’s not exactly my target demographic–unlike some of the old MuslimWakeUp/PMU crew, it sometimes seemed–but it’ll be interesting to see how much my hits increase.