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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Grim reaper with sombrero




I am often amused and baffled at the searches people conduct on Google that lands them on my microscopic piece of the Web. Apparently not one, but two people ended up at Dizgraceland while searching for "grim reaper with sombrero." Up until now, I have never written a post about a grim reaper with sombrero. So it just goes to show you that search engines do the best that they can with odd searches, but don't always deliver what you intended to look for.

 It's kind of like playing fetch with your dog. You throw a stick and sometimes they bring back a dead animal. Maybe not the best analogy.

 I don't claim to understand why someone would search for "grim reaper with sombrero." I think it may have something to do with a tattoo or motorcycle gang symbol. But if you do type "grim reaper with sombrero" in Google, you won't find the exact phrase, but it will pull up pages that use those words. And one of those was a series of my blog archives from 2011 where I talked about turning 53 and going to a Mexican restaurant where they would place a sombrero on my head and sing a Spanish version of "Happy Birthday." On that same page was a post about me putting my face on images of the grim reaper and calling them the "Tim Reaper." I don't think that was really what the searchers were looking for.

 It makes me wonder what we did before the Internet and Google when we wanted to uncover some obscure information. It wasn't like you could just drop by the public library and ask the reference librarian if they had any books about "grim reaper with sombrero." Though in the years I worked in a public library I heard some pretty bizarre requests.

 I for one don't know how we managed to do anything before there was the Internet. I forget how I found a hotel to stay at, purchased music, communicated with friend and family or found out what was going on in the world at any given second. I'm thinking of printing up t-shirts and bumper stickers that say, "I'll be wired until I've expired."

 Anyway, here's to all you random searchers. Without you I'd feel so alone.

2 comments:

Helen Baggott said...

Hmmm. They might have searched but did they read?

Time said...

I subscribe to the "even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut" school. I sincerely doubt whether they read anything or not, but if they left scratching their heads in confusion, my job here is done.