Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Lab report

One of the things you didn’t know about this blog is that a sizable amount of its traffic comes from Google searches for “Labrador porn”. Almost every time I check Sitemeter, there’s someone searching with that phrase (or a variant such as “porn, Labrador”) and ending up at this post. And it’s never the same person, unless it’s someone who travels around the globe expressly for the thrill of Googling on computers located in different countries. Apparently the world is full of fans of lab-porn: they hail from Michigan, London, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore (where the searcher specified “golden Labrador porn”), Bolivia, Tokyo, Madras. This shows that for all our superficial differences of culture, religion, language and race, people everywhere are basically the same. It’s a heartwarming thought.

Sitemeter also provides information about how long a particular visitor spends on the blog, individual pages visited etc, and as you might expect, Labrador-porn seekers tend not to linger at Jabberwock once they realise that Google has misdirected them. Don’t get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that a person interested in videos of humping doggies might not also be interested in a 3000-word interview/profile of Anita Desai or a review of a 1922 documentary; the human mind can be a fascinatingly inclusive thing and many of us have a wide range of interests. But I would think it’s definitely unlikely that a person looking for humping doggies would at that particular point in time be willing to settle instead for an Anita Desai interview or a review of a 1922 documentary, for there’s something very urgent and purposeful about a porn search; it's meant to fulfill an immediate need. At the most, I’d think such a searcher would bookmark the blog, telling himself, “The passive narrator in Murakami’s fiction! Cool, I’ll come back to that after the dog show.”

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to discover today, for the first time, a Labrador-porn Google searcher who actually lingered! Someone in Illinois who entered the blog at the “This Gun for Hire” post but who then – instead of shaking his fist at his screen and exiting in disgust as any self-respecting lover of lab-porn would do – proceeded to visit 13 more pages (including the Bougainvillea House review, which incidentally has a – non-sexual – mention of dogs) and eventually spent more than 30 minutes on the site. To this anonymous visitor, I would like to say: thanks for the patronage, and I hope your stay was worth the sacrifice.

20 comments:

  1. In a week when one of my favourite bloggers has restricted entry to her site, hats off to you Jai for welcoming all comers. May I forever be an URL...
    Lovely post, btw

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  2. "All comers" is a disturbingly apt way of putting it...

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  3. And do you still get people searching for "suhaag raat"? Eh?

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  4. Lab porn? Wait there is dog porn?
    My mind has gone into "does not compute" mode now.

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  5. Now, of course, people Googling for 'humping doggies' will come to your blog.

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  6. Yeah, bless Google - that helper dog to blind surfers (no pun intended whatsoever). I first chanced upon this blog while searching for 'Upamanyu Chatterjee, blog' and hit your review of Weight Loss. Needless to mention, my productivity has gone down even further at the office since that fateful afternoon about 8 months or so back.

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  7. hey,

    talking about search, in my opinion you should have a google search box in your blog. It is seriously difficult to search for the posts of my interest, given that I discovered this blog pretty recently. That saves much of my research time in lab (wait, i meant laboratory, not Labrador)

    Ohh boy, this captcha down here sucks. why cant you remove that pal. I hate commenting on blogs which run captchas. incidentally down here it spells "doudumm" .... is it some symbolic way of blogger to tell me to run ("doud")out of this blog!!!??

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  8. Seeji: There's a search box on the top left corner of the blog (the one Blogger provides) which is pretty convenient, I think. As for the "captcha", that's there for a very good reason - to filter automated spam comments.

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  9. Wait - so not only do you keep tabs on what searches bring people to your blog you actually then track how much time each person spent on the site and how many pages they viewed?

    Wow! I see a whole new world of joblessness opening before me.

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  10. I see a whole new world of joblessness opening before me.

    Says the boy who's working on a Ph.D

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  11. ohh,

    I never thought there will be one search box to use at top..... thanks pal

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  12. hmm....is this breach of privacy?

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  13. oh my, you actually are the top entry on Google for labrador porn.

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  14. I waited for a long time for someone to come to my blog searching for "lekhni". Unfortunately, a lot more people visit by searching "cooking ravana on friday".

    I wonder who cooks Ravana? On Fridays too?

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  15. "shakeela gang-bang" briefly flared up as a source of traffic sometime last year.

    Write just three posts about something and suddenly the search engines just brand you into a cubby hole no?

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  16. I strenuously object to this devaluation of a very wholesome genre in the pornographic arts. I have concluded that lab porn has nothing to do with retrievers but a series of films starring nubile (and virile) types from Labrador. In Canada. All perky because of the cold currents there. Umm, I think I'd better stop.

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  17. Lekhni, Sidin: what kinds of posts have you been writing to get traffic from those searches? "Lab porn" is almost homely in comparison.

    Zoot Suit: what about Labradors in Canada? They aren't perky?

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  18. He he....and you trying to climb up the list by posting one more on the same subject?! ;)

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  19. what about Labradors in Canada? They aren't perky?

    No... They got back problems...

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