Stats

I had NO idea what I was missing by not having a stat counter on my blog. I'm loving statcounter.com (f*ree and lots of features)! For one thing, it has given me ideas about things I need to blog about, over on my business blog. Over here on my personal blog, the stats have provided several minutes of happy fun per day as I scratch my head in wonder at the search queries that bring people here. For example, today there is the query "in a car accident, can a kleenex box kill?" My blog is the number 2 response at google, with a post (or two) that google summarizes as "A really spectacular four car accident. I've highlighted the skid marks in red. .... Plastic storage box holding: dog's seat belt, kleenex box, ..." Ok, yeah, the only keyword missing here is "kill" but it's an important one. This harkens back to my first attempt at a PhD, where I was researching automatic part-of-speech tagging in text so that computers could do a better job of understanding and automatically summarizing text (abstracts in journal articles, for example). If google had realized the importance of the keyword "kill" then it would have known that my blog entries were not relevant here even though they contain each of the other keywords sought.

The second interesting factoid for today is that a LOT of people are searching for info on Emerald's new "Cocoa Roast Almonds", and finding my review of them. 7 of the top 40 search phrases are related to these nuts. I should get some advertising going so that I can make money!