Being Searched

One of the things offered by the Opus content management system which we use for this site is "referrer logging". That means we can see where people came from to get to our site. Assuming the visitor's browser or proxy software isn't suppressing referrer headers (and some people do for privacy reasons) you get the URL for the page they clicked on to get to your page.

Opus knows about the common search engines and that means it can analyse the URL it gets and extract the search term used as that's encoded in the URL. The practical upshot of which is that I can see what people were searching for when they ended up on my pages.

Some of it's random but some things come up again and again, most of these (except the last one) are in there every day:

CHWEBFILING-DOM

This relates to this page in my blog. As you'll see it gets far more comments than any other page and the referrer log shows that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It looks like I'm getting around 3,000 hits a year. (I finally got around to writing to customer services at Companies House about this today. No response yet.)

who owns the Falklands

This is comes in waves so I suspect it's homework related. I hope they like the answers I give - whether their teachers do is another matter.

soft pretzels

Some years ago now I evolved this recipe for soft pretzels, the sort you can buy in Bavaria, based on recipes I'd found on American sites. My recipe gets quite a lot of hits now.

low alcohol beer

This, and variations thereof, gives lots of hits to my page on living a low/no alcohol life.

cd radio
green laning

My ancient articles on CB radio (written on 1995) and green laning (1996) are still getting hits on a daily basis.

domain registry of america

This one, I have to say, is rather pleasing as their search leads them to this page on our company web site warning people about these dodgy people (I see we're currently Google fourth hit for this search term - not bad).

collie cross boxer

Leads people to our page about Tilly which is a bit sad for me but it's at least remembering her life with us.

bluetooth kettle

No, I've no idea why anyone is searching for one of these but seven people have in the last fortnight!