How Did You Get Here?

Men tend to love statistics. You'll never hear a woman describe to her friend a guy who passes by as "42-32-34". Women don't care about statistics so much. But men can't get enough.

I'm a man and I like statistics too. And when there aren't enough beautiful women around, I have to look for them in other places. An excellent example being the statistics related to this blog. I use Sitemeter to track visitors to this blog. So there I was looking at some of the numbers and feeling very happy with so many statistics in front of me.

I focused my attention on the page that told me where people were getting to this blog from and what they were searching for. You may think of this as good customer care -- if I know what you people want to read then I can write about that. Of course, this isn't really true; but please assume it is.

There were a lot of referrals from blogs other than mine. These didn't interest me too much since they were either blogs where I was in the blogroll or one of the posts linked to something I had written. The one exception was a "referral" from "http://dilbertblog.typepad.com". (Sitemeter is really good and it told me this visitor was from Norway and even gave me his IP address. Why I would want this I will never know.)

For a few minutes, this was a bit of a puzzle indeed -- I was sure there was no link to my blog from Scott Adams' site. Then I was able to put that puzzle to rest when I realized that the same visitor had visited my blog a little while before that as well. (Here's where that IP address bit came in handy.) I concluded that he must have clicked the link on my blog to Scott's page and then hit the back button. If you are from Norway and are reading this and did indeed do that, please mail me to settle this matter once and for all. Do not try to fool me by pretending to be from Norway if you are not, because I will ask you what the capital of Norway is.

The other interesting entries were the Google searches that led here. Almost all of them surprised me -- some because I couldn't believe people searched for such things, others because I couldn't believe Google actually thought this blog was the appropriate site the particular search!

For example -- someone searched for "who are the kids that accompany world cup players onto the field" and this page of mine turns up as one of the results. Of course, it doesn't come remotely close to answering the question. If the guy who searched for that is reading this, I hope you've found the answer by now. And if you have, do tell me what it is. I'm just curious.