Google: Did you mean...?

There's a really great tool deep in the heart of Blogger that enables me to see how random people have come to stumble on my blog through search words. I mean, it tells me exactly what words they typed into the search engine in order to find my website. It's very cool and it really helps to learn what topics of mine are engaging a wider audience. But sometimes, it just confuses me.

To try and illustrate these search terms, I've included the very first photo that comes up when I search these terms myself. I hope you find them more helpful than I did.

"boy in a dress party": I would not say I am an expert in the field of boys in dresses at a party. My only experience is one Friday night when some friends were really bored and I was really accommodating, they dressed me as a drag queen, so for an hour or so I was a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl.

"scratched cornea" & "swollen knuckle": These two search terms are always rating amongst my highest traffic magnets. In fact, 'scratched cornea' is my single highest traffic raiser. Anyone would think I am an expert on obscure injuries or something.

"tool girls": I'm not sure what a tool girl is. Any guesses? Or is this something that is NSFW (which, for the uninitiated, means 'New South F#$@ing Wales'. (Actually, no it doesn't. I learned what it really means when I misread the words 'spent the day fisting' as 'spent the day fishing' and opened the accompanying photo.)

"anti+twitter": Yes, I was traumatised by that NSFW tweet but I wasn't exactly anti-Twitter, just anti-that-porn-star-that-was-funny-to-follow-until-he-scarred-me-for-life.

"hipster zombie before it was cool": While I'm not 100% sure, I think it's safe to say that before a hipster zombie was cool, it was just an elitist prat of a zombie who ate only the brains of vegans. But that's just a guess.

"justin bieber circumcised or uncircumcised": If I thought I was scarred after the 'fisting' tweet, I was naive. This search term has actually kind of traumatised me. I was in love with Josh Hartnett as much as a 15 year old girl can be. But I had ONE photo (out of the 100+) on my wall of him without a shirt on. It was from Black Hawk Down and he's in fatigue pants and dog tags, and a bit war-torn & dirty. But I never, in my young adolescent fantasties gave a second thought to his penis. He was like a Ken doll to me when I was 15. Hell, even now (when my sadly misguided affections have moved on to Topher Grace) do I have any thoughts of penises. Is that just me?

"raptor penis": If there's one consolation in the Justin Bieber horror story, it's that only one person found my blog searching that term. Thankfully the internet does not deem me an expert in the field. However, multiple people stumbled on my blog searching for more information on raptor penises. I can not fathom what information they were searching for but I sure hope they didn't find it here!

And lastly, an honourable mention must go to the following...

"what is that raptor sound in my backyard": This made me laugh & I hope this reader got a giggle out of my blog post about this very same subject. It's one of my favourites. (And the second photo in Google Images was the movie poster I made for this blog post.)

Miss SAMawdsley xx

PS: I have the lovely Miss Wanderlust to thank for this blog idea. She was the first person I saw do it and I give her all credit!

Questions:

• Can you explain any of these search terms?
• If you have a blog, what are some bizarre search terms that provide you traffic?
• What are some seriously weird things you've had to google? And why?

My Pet Raptor

Do you know what actually makes me sad? I will never own a dinosaur… This is actually a thought that really does consume some of my time and headspace! I really, really want a dinosaur. A tyrannosaurus-rex, an australovenator, a brachiosaurus, a velociraptor, a coelophysis... I'm really not picky. I was seven when Jurassic Park came out but I already loved dinosaurs. For as long as I can remember I imagined owning my own. It was kind of an impossible dream.

Do you know, once, I was home alone and I heard a weird sound out the backyard. Now I'm twentysomething but in the nanoseconds it took me to properly process the sound I heard, my brain had already made careful calculations and used logical reasoning to decide that it was a velociraptor. In my backyard.

Now you must realise, I fully believed this thought. In my mind, it was 100% fact. So I was super-excited. Like every single one of my wildest dreams had just come true. As far as I was now concerned I had a raptor, my very own raptor, in my backyard. It was going to be my pet, I was going to name it and train it do all sorts of neat tricks and I was going to be deliriously happy!

It was a tarp blowing in the wind. The sound, it wasn’t a raptor. I just thought I should clarify that in case anyone got over excited and started emailing me offering me money in exchange for my raptor before getting to the end of my story. So calm down.

Now in the ensuing nanoseconds, I was imagining the new awesomeness that was my new raptor-filled life. Seriously, just imagine for a second, that you had your own dinosaur. I hope you’re as excited as I am otherwise I might just start sounding ridiculous. But I was imagining how to tether the thing, I mean I couldn’t just have it running around Brisbane. Then I imagined riding it around Brisbane, because it can’t just run amok around the city, but my properly-harnessed raptor and I could totally have our own shenanigans. You know, raptors are OK under adult supervision, and after all, I am a responsible twentysomething. But I was probably going to be famous for having a pet dinosaur. Of course the fame would never get to my head. I mean really, it would just be a way to pay the raptor feeding bill. Whatever that would be… How much do dead goats go for these days...?

I didn’t name my raptor.

I didn’t get that far.

Because it was a tarp blowing in the wind.

I don’t have a pet velociraptor.

Miss SAMawdsley xx

Questions:

• What is the wildest dream you have ever had?
• Have you ever believed in something crazy, even for a moment?

{Note: Initial 'My Pet Raptor' logo borrowed from a band of that name.

Follow the link, I'm sure they rock!}