There was a time when searching any string of words with “Lascaux” in it would bring up my post, “The truth and change, 3a: From Life on Mars to Linden,” as one of the top three hits in the images section—because of the photograph I used of the caves in Lascaux, France. I got the photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Then there was “bee tree,” or “bee bee tree,” which for a long time brought up my photograph of a tree in Prospect Park, Brooklyn (11215), where I observed a bee swarm with my son in 2008. I took the photograph, along with the photograph of the bee warm itself. This photo was in the post, “The truth and Twitter, part 3: The Swarm.”
And then these images completely disappeared from the Google Images searches.
Which made me begin to wonder: How do search terms work? A friend told me to embed vivid descriptions in my photographs, because Google really likes this. And then I thought about all those search terms that I see every day on my data. Some are downright weird—“life goes on symbology” or “rocket party dei black eyed beans”—and some sound really cool—“gilgamesh Foucault” and “shot of major truth and rocket science.”
I’m no whiz in SEO (search engine optimization), but I thought it would be fun to post all the search terms I have seen, down to a certain level (all these are multiple viewings) that people have used to find truth and rocket science, whether they intended to or not. What happens when people search these terms? Do they come to this posting, or some other? Does this (not entirely) random assortment of words bring about some kind of Internet query magic? Would be fun to see …
Update, 15 minutes after I posted this originally
Within 15 minutes of posting this, these search strings came up. I just had to add them. It’s obvious why.
medieval witch killings paintings
envy the epic of gilgamesh
eclectic
wolverine michigan desk
maghan lusk
sleeping dogs
pond @wordpress
blacklight poster
zebras
brigadier pudding
hubris fingerprint
faroeste gary cooper
mirrors “lady from shanghai ”
blacklight poster
bee bee tree (almost every day for a while)
lady from shanghai mirror scene
“not many people make me laugh”
tett creativity complex
john locke public domain pictures humane
iran twitter
rocket party dei black eyed beans
bacon francis house
Walgreen
lotte zweig
“kareem fahim”
zebras
twitter iran
reichstagsbrand
sleeping dog
bee tree
sleeping dogs
Walgreens
zak smith
tattoo and tattoos
“life goes on” tattoo
tattoo design principles
Credit: The photograph is of tattoo work by Grisha Maslov, copyright 2010, obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Gilgamesh
heroism in Gilgamesh
gilgamesh Foucault
Foucault Gilgamesh
Note: I am not sure where this came from, since Foucault is not mentioned in the post with Gilgamesh.
amoebas and dysentery
gas exchange in amoebas
amoeba pictures
poem on dysentery
amoebic dysentery brazil
live amoeba vs. fixed amoeba
Amoeba
Brazil
brazil land of the future by Zweig trans
lolalita brasil1
brasilia architecture falling apart
brasilia
faroeste caboclo
brazil colony
forest manaus
social science
standard deviation diagram
one standard deviation bell curve
stats bell curve normal curve
standard deviation bell curve
bell curve
iq bell curve
bell curve standard deviation
iq bell curve diagram
standard deviation diagram
bell curve diagram
unicorns and medieval stuff
medieval maiden painting
unicorn pictures
unicorn truths
unicorn Bristol
unicorns
unicorn
unicorn medieval
unicorn museum castles in new york
the unicorn leaps out of the stream
the start of the hunt
unicorn in captivity
the unicorn is found
the start of the hunt
the truth about unicorns
the hunt of the unicorn
Sylvia Plath and Leonard Shelby
plath writing
leonard shelby
Credit: The chart of the timeline of Memento (Christopher Nolan) is by Dr Steve Aprahamian, and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
truth and rocket science
truth and rocket science (lotsa times)
rocketscience.com
rocket science in our lives
shot of major truth and rocket science
truth and rocket science
the truth about diamonds
the truth and sleeping dogs
Lascaux
The House of Tomorrow, 35,000 BCE
Lascaux
lascaux cave pictures
lascaux paintings
lascaux cave paintings
lascaux cave
lascaux painting
lascaux images
cave art Lascaux
lascaux caves france
cave paintings Lascaux
lascaux pictures
cave of Lascaux
lascaux caves
caves of Lascaux
truth and rocket science 
Lascaux will always remind me of the art history class I took in college… & wished that I had taken sooner so that I would have double-Majored. I think I’d be much happier as a curator than a bookkeeper these days!
And of course, Leonard Shelby just rules in all his confusion. Or was it confusion?
Prehistoric art and anterograde amnesia. Cool shit.
Mich,
Thank you. I work hard at trying to find the obvious, simple, and easy connections between obscure things. Perhaps you too are a curator of things. You just have to admit which things you are curating. And how are you doing? We haven’t emailed in a while. Would love to hear a story from you.
John
lol. toe re somerazy seach results.
It does make one wonder
sorry, i meant to say this.
Lol those are some crazy search results
I does make one wonder
Everything about Google makes me wonder. After posting this, I got no search results for several days, as if Google were playing a trick on me. Then the weird search results began popping up again. Your guitar macro is a really nice photo. I like it quite a bit. –John
Wow. That’s is quite a list. This is my favorite: faroeste gary cooper. Isn’t it interesting how the human mind works in making connections and how the logic of the computer translates this?
It’s cool, Lita. This one came up yesterday and got me 2 hits:
greatest parietal art public domain
You ever look at your list? John
Is it the list on the blog stats page or another one?
Lita,
Go to your dashboard. To the right, you should see a section called “stats” with a graph of recent hits. Under it there are things like “top searches”, “most active,” etc. Beneath that is a button called “view all” and you press that. The next page has a big graph, and then below that “Search Engine Terms” and data on those, recently. Those data go back a couple of days. Then click on “Search Engine Terms” and it will go to a new page with search terms data for a lot of time and more options for period sin which to measure them. Try this.
You have posts that are so full of different things that you might have a lot. Experiment with tags and use a lot of them.
Let me know how you fare…
John