Tuesday, January 05, 2010

2009 blog statistics: What questions did people ask?

Following is an aggregation of search terms that led to my blog, with some insights.  In each case, the search term was some variant on the heading.

1) What does IBM do?  That was by far the most common question.  Askers landed here because of the heading of a post: "Just what does IBM do?", which discussed the corporations transformation from computer mainframe manufacturer to software and services vendor.  Most people asking this question seemed to come from the US, as it happens.
2) Vigrass and Osbourne: the underrated 1970s duo, who are perhaps most famous for the original version of Forever Autumn, used in Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds.
3) Worldwide Gun Statistics: perhaps again popular due to the post's heading.  The queries were typically variants of gun ownership statistics, followed by gun homicide stats, followed by gun control stats.
4) Error converting data type varchar to real: In Microsoft's SQL Server database (more specifically, in Transact-SQL), I had difficulty translating a text data type to a real number data type.  So I researched the answer, and published it.  It's a common enough need that it ought to be reasonably intuitive, but on the basis of those searching for the solution, it wasn't.
5) Cancion MixtecaHarry Dean Stanton sang this mournful old Mexican tune beautifully, on the soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas.  Given the rendition was so moving - and so was the film - you would expect the song to be in the film.  But for some reason it's not - the film carries only a snatch of Ry Cooder's instrumental version.

I suspect a given post's heading was the chief deterimant of a search engine directing traffic here.  So it pays to consider the heading carefully: pithy and direct.

In fact, if you count image searches, the above would be swamped by people's searches for pictures of stars, planets, and moons in perspective, and platypuses, or their eggs.

1 comment:

bazza said...

Hi Stephen. I have finally started blogging again! See http://todiscoverice.blogspot.com
I look forward to keeping in touch with you again.
I am pleased to see that the standard of your blog remains high but saddened that it still remainscriminally under recognised!
Regards, Bazza.