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Proverbs 30:29-31

Search-query poetry

When you have a blog or a web site, you quickly realize that many people are stumbling across your site because of a Google search. There are plenty of tools that can analyze your log files and tell you precisely what Google searches people are typing that lead to your blog. (Back in the fall, I discovered — to my mild horror — that I was a first-page result for “upskirting” on Google, because of a post I once made about mobile-phone voyeuring. Thankfully, these days I seem to have fallen back to the third page of results.)

Now bloggers have started to collect together the weirdest searches that led to them. One cool site in this regard is Disturbing Search Requests. Another one is Search Extract Poetry — searches assembled into often-striking bits of verse:

the most unevenly matched game of Twister
and you for me So…
Right there!
Something had gone terribly wrong…
Oh, wait!

Unfortunately, the site hasn’t been updated for a year or so.

(Thanks to Jessica for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson