This is a break from quantum physics – you deserve it! Based on your questions – no un-follows so far fortunately – I will follow-up with attempting again to pick the right metaphors for 1026 dimensional spaces and tons of enormous vectors.
But there is more (enigmatic) to this universe than quantum field theory – such as search terms submitted by our blogs’ visitors.
Samir Chopra, philosophy professor and published author, has said it very well in his freshly pressed post on search terms “The Peculiar Allure of Blog Search Terms” which also features this poem of mine.
I quote from his post:
Most of all though, search terms are a glimpse of the hive mind of the ‘Net: a peek at the bubbling activity of the teeming millions that interact with it on a daily basis, seeking entertainment, amusement, edification, gratification, employment. They make visible the anxiety of the questions that torment some and the curiosity–sometimes prurient, sometimes not–that drives others; they remind us of the many different functions that this gigantic interconnected network of networks and protocols plays in our lives, of the indispensability it has acquired.
This quote would certainly improve the quality of my future search terms a lot…
But Google is going to spoil our playful crafting of poetry from our blog statistics: Starting 2011 SSL (https) has been used with Google’s search results pages if you had been logged on to a Google app such as Google+. Now pages are encrypted even for anonymous users.
This had been called a reaction to the NSA spying on us, and/or Google wants us to AdWords – as there is no encryption of ad-related clicks.
From an internet standards’ perspective this is fine: RFC 2626 – which defines HTTP – states that
Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol.
… which means that if you click on a link displayed on a page whose address starts with https the target website will not know / log where you came from.
What does it mean for search term poets? Will this history of my meteoric rise to fame as a search term / spam poet suddenly come to an end?
Here are some ideas of mine:
Use other stuff as spam, comments, error messages – as I did in some poems already. I had even poeti-cized my own blog posts’ titles and a full post of mine. But search terms from unknown visitors have been the most inspirational snippets from the virtual scrapyard.
Use Google / Bing Webmaster Tools’ output instead of WP Stats – I have done this, too. The poem quoted by Samir Chopra was one of those peppered with terms from Webmaster Tools. This is a violation of my own rules, though a documented one.
In order to setup your blog with these tools you need to prove ownership by adding a meta tag in your WP blog’s settings. The downside: You can only access the search terms submitted within the last month at every point in time so you would need to save them every day, and Google only gives you a number of clicks if it was higher than 10. Otherwise (<10) it might just have been an ‘impression’ – your blog just showing up in search results, but users did not click your link.
More ideas?
engineering and art meets
steampunk icons electrical panel
interactive floor tetris
geeky fascination
back to the future
(Snippet from my most recent search term poem)
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Adding a matching collage of mine – in 2025:
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