Monday, November 24, 2008

How to miss the point with Google

Finding the mysterious ways readers get to your blog is a never ending source of delight for bloggers. Today I found that a search on "worms in oreo cookies" brought someone here. That was a real head scratcher and I just couldn't resist following the link. It was this one:
On being white in America.

The phrases that Google wisdom found were
    "Although I haven't found a scholarly article that traces when the worm turned and it became bad to be White in America, . . ."

    plus

    "Increasingly, being Catholic, if you are also white, will get you no "brownie points" (pardon the pun); and if you are a middle-class or wealthy African-American, you just might be white on the inside (oreo) and have sold out your heritage since you are too rich and educated to be an Uncle Tom."
Isn't Google amazing? But I've seen even stranger leaps from people who actually read the blog entry!

But sometimes, I check the search back, and this one to the AOL robot/spider search, and find information I'm interested in, like today's AOL: "womans home companion magazine-paper dolls" brought someone here, but by back tracking, I found many more sites about magazine paper dolls I hadn't checked.

Ten years ago we librarians used to say that the WWW was like a library where everything was on the floor, or like hunting through someone else's garage, but it's much better organized these days with so many finding aids. More like the books and magazines I store in the bathroom.

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