Lessons for Bloggers, #1

If you don't want to have people with uncommon sexual peccadilloes coming to your blog, do not use the word "fetish." Ever. No matter what. On the other hand, if you like amusement from a.) the bizarre things that turn people on and b.) the random ways in which some search engines examine online content, then use fetish often.

As has been discussed here many times, people with some weird-ass fetishes end up coming to BlackRedYellow. And unfortunately for them, this site is going to do little to satisfy anyone's sexual jones, unless there are people who happen to get off on rambling sentence structure, corny jokes, and more detailed descriptions than you'd find in New York magazine of the restaurant where I just dined.

That makes me think...shouldn't there be a fetish site for people who get off on bloggers without a life or something. Some kind of "pale computer geek fetish" or something?

Anyway, the latest weirdness to get directed to my page is "women with haircutting fetishes." I was unaware of it, but apparently there are people out there for whom cutting the hair of women is rather....uh...enjoyable, and women who "like" having their hair cut. Like I said, you learn something new every day. And while I don't understand it, it seems much safer than some other fetishes out there.

I think the reason I get these things is because of how Yahoo! search looks at blogs. Basically, it examines the archive pages and strings together keywords, whether they seem to have any related context or not. Because it's looking at an entire month of posts, it can easily find many bizarre strings of words used over the course of the month.

Using the same search string on Google blog search, nothing turns up (not even my blog). Searching the web as a whole generates plenty of results, but not my blog, at least on the first few pages (it was #6 on Yahoo! search).

So I think Yahoo! needs to refine its search algorithms.

Another weird search result: someone found me while searching for "Applebee's cheese pasta." (Again on Yahoo!)

I don't know why you found my blog, but I'll just help out anyone else searching for it: I haven't eaten it, but I can tell you that it sucks. Why? Because it's from Applebee's, which in addition to having horrible, boring recipes, brings its pasta dishes frozen in a truck and microwaves them before bringing them to your table. Save yourself a few bucks by buying a TV dinner.

Applebee's. They say they're America's favorite neighbor. If you mean "neighbor" in the sense of a company that homogenizes America with crappy food while driving local establishments out of business, then sure....I guess so.