Actual unretouched phrases that people plugged into search engines this week that led them to this site (with some commentary from me):
“3 psychological concepts from tforrest gump”
“bang bang you’re dead study guide”
“black snake moan meaning”
“concept behind american psycho”
“meaning of horses in michael clayton”
“what conflict of the happy feet story” <--- I know what everyone’s homework assignment was...
“are there any female minions in despicable me?” <--- note the assumption that the minions are male
“claudia black ben browder married” <--- the new James Garner and Mariette Hartley (married? yes. to each other? no.)
“straight woman long gaze”
“seth macfarlane alcoholic”
“aliens in stargate are stupid”
“amelia pond fake” <--- yessss, she’s a fictional character
“appeal to madame tussauds”
“are brits americans” <--- whut?
“brainy smurf fanfiction” <--- dear god no
“combat coffee”
“comic con is ruined”
“doctor who dating site”
“mariann johannsen film critic”
“mary ann johansen”
“maryanne johanson”
“maryann johansson film critic” <--- there really are a ridiculous number of ways to spell both my names
“mary ann crap” <--- thanks
“tom ward david tennant” <--- I know, right?
“daniel craig smiling” <--- so rare ya gotta Google to find it
fun stuff from FlickFilosopher stats week of Jan 5-11 2013
share and enjoy
“Straight Woman Long Gaze” should be the title of the autobiography of someone really impressive – Jane Goodall or someone of that calibre.
Am I the only one who thinks there’s something a little…icky…about publishing these? Like something private has been made public.
A couple made me giggle, but I didn’t much like myself for it.
So, possible question of the day maybe? Should search engine data be protected?
Protected from whom? Should webmasters not be allowed to see this stuff?
From being held up to public scrutiny. I’m not saying there should be barriers to webmasters having the information, just that it should be used in the manor it is provided.
I’ve certainly google-d a few phrases in my time that I wouldn’t want pasted up for anyone to read, no matter how anonymously. I doubt I’m alone in that.
Perhaps I am being over-sensitive. I work in a career where confidentality and information governance is sacrosanct.
Search terms are accessible. Unless we set our browsers not to, our browsers save our previous search terms. Search engines collect that stuff, either specific to a user or general to a geographical area of IPs or some other group. Websites want to know what terms led to them. This is how they can tweak their metadata to be more appropriate (or their advertising).
Should they be? I don’t see why not. I’d object if they were published with identifiedd users, though.
There’s a Doctor Who dating site? *perks up*
But it sounds more like the title of a Cake song. ;-)
Turn your settings in your browser to ‘don’t accept cookies’
Not accepting cookies will help with many things, but to avoid your search strings becoming available to the web site owner you’ll need to suppress Referer: headers (which most browsers don’t support natively, though there are plenty of plugins to do it).
Or use a less creepy search engine, of course. I like duckduckgo.com.