kraft ride quartz teach deprivation

Although I cannot know for sure, short of coming out and asking the chief suspects, I'm pretty sure today's title illustrates a conspiracy.

In a previous post, I had described my attempts to analyze visitors to this site and what was bringing them to me through use of extreme tracker. I was particularly fascinated (okay, appalled) by the Google and other engine searches that resulted in "unique" (i.e., one-time visitors) to my blog. People would type "boring" and "family photos" into Google, and somehow end up at my site. (Well, I have "boring" in the title, and "family photo" in one entry, so...)

Then things got weird.

I started seeing these really strange search terms turning up -- things like today's title -- that made my brain hurt. What possible interest could cause someone to come up with that list of terms? Were these people with really bad search skills, or was I somehow attracting a lunatic fringe interested in ... well, what the hell would "kraft", "ride", "quartz" "teach" and "deprivation" have in common?

Turns out, Neo-Opsis editor and practical joker, Karl Johanson, had taken it upon himself to organize a conspiracy of about half a dozen people to read my blog, pull out random words, then do a google search on them. Of course, the result was dozens of totally bizarre word combinations that defied analysis.

Fortunately, Karl confessed before I went completely nuts.

But now, I'm thinking, this has got to be a reusable practical joke. Who do I know who regularly looks through their tracker's to analyze search engine referrals?

Or, is there a company out there we want to mess with? Some company that deserves a boycott? Instead of stop buying stuff off their web site, we could just organize a couple of hundred people to scan the site for a combination of words that when strung together out of context, would make their CEO nervous: say, "international" from their marketing page, "criminal" from their ad saying, "prices so low it's criminal" and "organization" from their description of their organizational chart, and then some fairly unique word from their site, say, "Kumquat" that would put the whole combination high in a google search to make it easy for the conspirators to find it quickly when scanning the search engine results page. So at the end of the month when marketing has to report what the number one search engine result was for their storefront, the report goes to the CEO that folks are hitting on the site looking for "international criminal organization Kumquat". Would make for an interesting board meeting with the guys from marketing, eh?

Just a thought...