Fun With Google

Dale really should work for Google. I don't know anyone who makes as much use of Google's ever-increasing array of online tools, or who gets so much out of them. Dale's the one who introduced me to Google Analytics, and now I can't stop going to that site and reading my site statistics.

For a long time, I thought that no one (except maybe Jana, who owns Dinah's litter sister Buffy) read my blog, Okay, Jana and Dale. Maybe Sue, too. Oh, and Kathy, of course. I didn't think I had much of an audience. After all, my other blog was twice as high in the Technorati ratings, and people left comments all the time.

Then I started reading Google Analytics. It turns out that this little blog has a small but devoted international following, and it's beginning to draw more readers than my other blog. What a surprise! Although my local friends and our faithful fans/family in the Czech Republic always rank #1 and #2 in visits, people are reading this blog from Turku, Nicosia, Managua, Cebu, Melbourne, and other corners of the globe. The globe, as it turns out, has a lot of corners!

The thing I found truly amusing, though, is the list of search phrases that people use in search engines in order to reach my blog. "Muddy pantyhose" always ends up in the top 10, even though I wore pantyhose to one show once back in May of 2006. The fun never stops! A lot of the inquiries -- maybe even most of the inquiries -- must come from people who also call themselves Dog Show Newbies. I get lots of inquiries about handling classes, stacking dogs, recipes for show bait, and the general "dog showing 101," "dog shows for dummies," and "beginning dog shows" type queries. Here are a few of my favorites from the past month, though (aside from the perennial favorite "muddy pantyhose," which again finished way up there):

compliments for a dog show handler
does Joseph Gregory judge dog shows in Canada?
exquisitely bitches (please tell me this one was for dogs...!)
it is plagiarism if you steal from yourself?
when does a collie dog go into season?
biggest butt photo (somehow, I don't think this one is for dogs...)

You do wonder sometimes what folks have in mind when they're entering the less obvious search strings. Maybe I'm best off not knowing why "muddy pantyhose" is so popular.