Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

‘How to Make a Furby Stop Buzzing’

This is the flat-out funniest search term I’ve seen to date that brings up my blog in Google’s search results — actually, I’m fourth on the list (out of 14,700), which was complete news to me. Goes to show you search algorithms still have a long way to go, I guess. How do I find such things, you ask? (I don’t even own a Furby, or know anyone who does.) Here’s how: in the traffic stats provided by my blog hoster, Typepad, I can see referring sites that bring people to my blog page — and that includes searches people do at Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and other such sites. But the interesting thing is that I get to see the search term they used. These terms have been all over the map, but I think this is the first one that actually made me laugh out loud… So, how in the world does my blog come up on such a strange search request? I certainly don’t have a “Toys” category. Well, let me explain. First, here’s a screen-grab of part of the search-results page. Furbysearchpage

I attended a technology conference early this year called Demo, and I blogged a lot about that event. Some 70 new companies and products were debuted there, one of which was the “Pleo,” which was from the same guy who invented the “Furby.” In the particular post where I mentioned the Pleo and the Furby, I also had used the term “buzz” — meaning the media and blog coverage that Demo creates. All that must have really been confusing to this little kid (I assume) who was dutifully slogging through all these search results trying to get the damn toy to shut up! 🙂

2 Comments

  1. PXLated

    Referrer logs, always fun to review. Glad to see you looking at them. Did my email prod you into it? 😉

  2. Graeme Thickins

    Oh, your emails prod me into a lot of things…but, no, I’ve been amazing myself reading my referrer logs since I started this crazy blog. It’s one of my favorite pastimes….most underrated part of doing a blog. 🙂

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.