Backwards Search

Do you backwards search? Can you? Let's see it.

Play the Gwigle Game and see if you can guess the search terms that brought up the first results. Brought to you no thanks to Lisa Mac, who wouldn't know a native city girl if she bumped into her at Ikea. (all 16 levels, thanks Wang; I did learn stuff. :-)

Now, for the authentic backwards search.

Do you know what random searches will bring your site up in the top results? I know some of mine from looking at referring urls that brought traffic here. Some are very surprising.

Here are some shockers:
[Given exactly as originally typed; rank valid on date the search brought traffic to my site.]
Search terms (Resulting rank of blog) My notations

*.blogspot (7) in the German google
FBI stationary (1)
mark zuckenberg income (1) in google and yahoo
"oil market" "invisible hand" (1)
rouge generals of Afghanistan (5)
simulated ignorance (1) no comment
percent of americans who approve of bush doings (3)
distrbuting in an internet (1) (sic) in the Arabic google.com/intl/ar/
Human Rights Foundation + New York (unknown on first page) since my post on 11/05, much more has been written about HRF in the news and I failed to note the exact ranking
Graduation Poem Baz Luhrmann (13)
Baz Luhrmann graduation poems (9)
hit&run video google (1) in the Hungarian google.hu
sarah Feinholtz (1) she's in the Illinois House of Rep.
colburn correspondent video (7)
Brue Galbraith (5)

For many of these searches, I might expect Google to find other sites more important or relevant. But the visa versa surprise is also true: for colburn+bush (16). And for my own name, the blog is only the third result.

A cursory scan to find other blogs discovering their top google rankings produced only one post. The Secret Life of Kat is amused to find funny phrases she can be searched for. This is a bit different, because most of the search phrases were cherry picked one-of-a-kind phrases directly from her site. Do you know what random (generic) search terms your site shows up for in the top Google results?


Update: Okay, one more because this one is just so cool, honestly.
bootleggers/speakeasies (6) cheers