HitTails Stats

I’m not going to go into all the HitTails that have turned up in the last few days, but it’s interesting to note that a search for AIMPromote (which I wrote about the other day) brings up my blog as the first result on Google! Most intriguing.

Someone even searched for ‘blackheads in the neck’, and we got picked up. The knitting poem I quoted back in February came third on the list of Google results, and even my mention of the Fred Astaire movie,Second Chorus, gave us seventh place in line. And a search for ‘most religious country and survey and Japan,’ gave us about tenth place. I’d be interested to know if someone was searching on these words because of an article that appeared in the ODT the other day by the usually reliable Gwyn Dyer. In it he talked about some study that had stated that religious countries (including the US) have higher degrees of immorality, from murder down to child abuse. Secular countries, such as New Zealand, supposedly have less immorality. Now this is curious, because the post I did on this topic goes back to late 2005 and in it I discussed at some length a column written by George Monibot, who’d written in The Guardian about the same issue. It’s curious because normally I would read Dyer and find him most credible. However, this column was not only out of his usual field of world politics, it was blatantly wrong. New Zealand is a very secular society: yet we have child abuse, murder, teen pregnancies, divorce, and pretty much everything else to a fairly high degree. We are certainly not a moral society as a whole.

Another search, this time for Dame Maggie Smith, again brings this blog to the top of the list, this time on the Google blog search, rather than Google as a whole. And another search, for Hornby and Gilead, brings us back to the top of the whole Google results. We’re sixth in the list for a search for Shaun Tilby, the Otago Nuggets basketball player. (Go, Shaun!)
And finally, people are continuing to search for our old friend, Brent Stavig. And because we’ve given him mentions more than once recently, we turn up twice in the Google results, in sixth and seventh place.

Why am I excited by all this? Does it mean anything at all? Well, yes. Presumably it means that if I turn up on the first page of the Google results then I’ve got a good chance of being looked at. Things that turn up on the next page, are vastly less likely to be seen.