what do your search terms tell about you?
I saw this question asked somewhere recently. (I don’t remember where – sorry.) This got me thinking: what do my OWN search terms tell about me?
So, out of curiosity, I decided to keep track of my web searches terms for one week. (Not the ones that drive traffic to my blog, mind you, but the things I MYSELF was searching for on the internet.) When I google, I google on Bing. It’s just a little foible I have. So here are the words and phrases that I searched for on Bing this past week:
number of people living in [name of my town]
how is coffee made into decaf
percent of women who have had a miscarriage
Bible passages about fathers selling their daughters
bullshit radar
Keira Knightly topless photoshoot
Pope Francis quotes
does Islam have an end of the world prophecy
Plus, I looked up definitions for these words:
fallacy
ne plus ultra
snarky
And I looked up how to spell:
menstruation
Saskatchewan
consensus
When I homeschooled my kids, they would ask me a ton of questions and if I didn’t know the answer, we would look it up. Here are some of the things I have googled on behalf of my children:
When did knights in shining armor live?
How many species of flightless birds are there?
Why is milk white?
How many teeth does a rabbit have?
Why are dogs noses wet?
Why are dogs noses black?
How many layers of skin do humans have?
Does a barnacle ever move?
How cold is the north pole during the winter?
I still don’t know what any of this says about me. Not a whole lot that my blog doesn’t already cover in greater detail. What do your internet search engine terms say about you?
45 comments on “what do your search terms tell about you?”
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LOL XD
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🙂
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Binging different things is a great writing tool. Sometimes even though you think you know what something means, you can get a better way to explain or write about it when you bing it.
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Good point.
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I use Bing for search too. It’s kind of in protest against the hold Google has on the Internet. Even so, I do have a GMail address and a membership at Google+. I’d get rid of all my affiliation with Google but then I’d lose touch with some on my family.
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Yes, my Bing use is a little in protest of Google too. 🙂
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I am a total window shopper online. I search by store name or brand. Yesterday I googled ‘timbuktu’ – the San Fran Co…..love the bags!
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I don’t love shopping online. I like to see and touch things before I buy them. But it is quite a shopping-desert here where I live in northern California. The closest good shopping is all down in the San Francisco Bay Area, hours away from here.
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Bing looks like it was built by hackers? LOL!! Love your list. I am afraid to keep track of my searches. But actually, since all these search engines are taking notes on us, it would be cool if we could access our own records!
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That would be SO cool. I wish that was possible. It would be interesting to read.
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Interesting to keep track a week . I think though that my blog says more of who I am. 🙂
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I’m going to keep keeping track for another week to see what comes up. Which is pretty self-interested, to be honest. But then so is my whole blogging endeavor, pretty much. So I guess it should come as no surprise to anyone reading here. Heh.
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I want to let you know that I have nominated your awesome Blog for the One Lovely Blog Award.
I appreciate your thoughts and the message you are trying to spread through your words, and look forward to seeing and hearing more.
Please visit http://thebuddhasutra.com/2014/11/14/one-lovely-blog-nomination/ for details on accepting this nomination.
Happy writing!
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Thanks for the compliment. I’m very grateful. Have a lovely day! 😀
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good post and I love the comments to it.
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Thanks, me, too. The comments are always half the fun here at the Honking Goose – thanks for noticing! 😀
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Mine can be a little boring. It mostly includes texture sites for my animation. Free to use music and sound effects such as that. Animation news, and Greek Mythology lol pretty boring to most people.
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I don’t know much about animation or sound effects, but I think Greek Mythology is super fascinating. 😀
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Greek Mythology is fascinating, I’ve always had a special interest in it since I was young.
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My search engine terms tend to hint (or scream) I’m probably a psychopath. Especially some of my recent ones –
I do not kill people
Unicorn stab head
Good morning assassins
Only alive because can’t afford hitman
Some of my other searches have included things like:
How far can a human fall without dying
What organs can be stabbed without killing someone
Can someone survive with their intestines outside of their body
My most recent search terms were for my most recent blog post, however – which was about knowing about the first time a writer’s villain ever killed anyone. I was searching for a lot of memes that had to do with killing people.
My other frequent searches have to do with my own writing. It can’t be much a surprise that someone who has a deep, abiding love for good villains has horrible, horrible things happen in her stories.
Turns out that people have survived falling out of an airplane, btw. And shock alone is likely to make it impossible that someone could survive with their intestines out of their body, which ruins that gruesome scene with my psychopath. Sigh.
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Oh, I was thinking, of course, umm, that is totally creepy, why are you sharing all this with me. Until you said it was research for your writing. Suddenly it makes sense and it is not scary at all. That just goes to show: setting is everything. 🙂 Thanks for sharing!
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XD Sorry to alarm. (I always wonder if I’m getting myself nailed to some NSA watchlist.)
Thanks for not fleeing in terror!
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Not at all, the build up made it more interesting. 🙂
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I wish I would’ve kept a list – what a great idea!
I just tweeted the other day that I wonderef if Google employees talk about us around the water cooler…
“Dude, did you see that search combo come through this morning – ‘jelly bean bra strap stores’? I mean c’mon. WTF?”
“That’s nuthin’. Yesterday someone asked ‘How do you jump start a tarantula?’ followed by ‘adjectives fish might say’.”
“Where does the Internet find these wackos? Oh, shhh… here comes Ted. You know he got transferred last week to the Find-the-Smut-Nut-Jobs Department.”
“Yikes! Tough break. Man, the search stories he must have though.” 😳
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That’s pretty funny. Now I’m tempted to type in your imaginary search terms just to see what comes up. 🙂
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I don’t know why milk is white but did you know that a Hippo’s milk is pink?
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I have heard that. But I’ve never seen it.
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A Hippo sweats red as well !
Most recent search did not deliver a proper answer
What is the difference between Rotate and Revolve
3rd person present: rotates
move or cause to move in a circle round an axis or centre.
“the wheel continued to rotate”
synonyms: revolve, go round, turn, turn round, move round, spin, gyrate, wheel,whirl, twirl, swivel, circle, pirouette, pivot, reel
“the wheels had to rotate continually to provide power”
revolves
move in a circle on a central axis.
“overhead, the fan revolved slowly”
synonyms: go round, turn round, rotate, spin, whirl, pirouette, wheel
“overhead, the fan revolved slowly”
Would I be mostly right in saying a planet revolves around it’s own axis but rotates around the sun?
In my home language directly translated it would be turns around axis and orbits around sun
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We say the planet rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun.
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the whole looking up the spelling of Saskatchewan made me chuckle, most people outside the province can barely pronounce it let alone spell it ! lol and listening to Americans try and say Saskatchewan is simply priceless lol
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and that was because I was trying to type it in a comment to you – did you remember that? If I try to type something three or four times and spell check still tells me I’m wrong, I’ll search it to find out.
But I can say Saskatchewan. See? I just said it. (I think) 😉
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yeppers I surely do remember lol
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You mean there are programs that help you find stuff on the Internet!? Sorry about that, I couldn’t resist. This week I looked up the usual stuff in relation to the Blogs I wrote, and quite a bit of stuff all related to Assyrian Christians, because with the problems they’ve been having with ISIS in combination with all the other problems they’ve been having, it looks like the world is on the verge of losing an entire culture and the language that goes with it, and I wanted to learn what I could about these people before they disappear forever. If I did write about them, it would be way too involved for a Blog post, but I’m thinking someone, probably way more talented than me, should in fact be doing some writing on these people. The more I read, the more fascinated I become. Anyway, once again, I’m babbling. I’ll read you later.
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I thought this would make a more interesting post back when I conceived it a week ago. But when I saw how few searches I had and how they were mostly things I had already written about on my blog it wasn’t as illuminating as I thought it might be. That’s why I also had to throw in the searches I have done at the behest of my children.
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Oh, this made me laugh. I really needed a laugh today. Thanks for giving me something other than crap, to think about. That’s always a bonus.
Now, coming from a psych background, I analyzed what your searches said about you. I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to share it with you. (One of the pitfalls of being neck deep in a psych degree for years! My poor family!)
Now, I haven’t delved into your blog so, this is just based on this post. I’ll be back though, when I’ve got more time.
Versatile, curious, knowledgeable, studious, human, resourceful, educated, dedicated and caring parent, socially aware.
I would have also put male, but searching for menstruation threw me. No, come to think of it… I’d put male… The Keira Knightly thing. You could be female, though because plenty of women admire other women’s topless photoshoots and want to buy a pair of those; but I don’t think so.
I’m so glad I stopped by and you distracted me from my own bullshit! Hopefully I’ve given you something back, to laugh about or maybe something a bit more. 🙂
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Thank you for stepping in to do the analyzing part. I think it would have been presumptuous and narcissistic for me to say those things about myself and I don’t have the educational background to make those connections anyway.
But I am not a male. If I were I probably would have had a lot more searches in the vein of the topless Keira Knightly one, but I wouldn’t necessarily have shared them all with my readers.
I am a woman. I heard Keira Knightly did a topless photoshoot as an act of protest against over-photoshopping of published images. So I looked it up. 😀
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I hope you enjoyed it. I’m skipping around the internet today having a bit of fun. Stress therapy!
Yeah, that Keira Knightly one threw me. Otherwise, I would have though, definitely a mum. I’ve done homeschooling when I was waiting for my son to go through an Autism assessment. It was out of pure need, for him not to hurt himself or others.
After the assessment, he went into a special needs class and transitioned back to mainstream to complete high school. He’s off to Uni next year and I don’t think that would have happened if I didn’t intervene and take over for a while. I take my hat off to you; it’s a huge job and people who haven’t experienced it have no-idea the work or enjoyment it brings. Who better to educate a child, than their parent?
Anyway, good on Keira Knightly! I might look that one up myself. Have a great day. 🙂
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I also use Bing rather than Google: I had a weird Goggle redirect problem, and I switched to Bing — never looked back. Most recent searches have to do with blog posts, to tell you the truth (except for the cub scout activity pin search initiated by my son): spellings of words, quick reference checks, etc.. Kind of disturbing how blogging is even taking over my Bing searches.
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My husband is a total internet snob and he once told me that Bing looks like it was built by hackers. So I stopped using it for a couple months. Until I realized I like the way it looks just fine and I like not using Google. And I don’t know what my husband was talking about and maybe he said it to tease me. So now I use Bing all the time again. Blogging has totally taken over my searches as well.
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Bullshit radar?!! XD and Keira Knightley? Oh my gosh!
Mine…mine…hmm I don’t get many search terms (thankfully!) but the weirdest one used the word “peculiar” in it. O.O
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Your comment made me realize the way I had worded this post was too ambiguous. It sounded like I was talking about the search terms that have brought people to my blog, when what I meant was the things that I myself had searched for on the internet this week.
I made some quick edits. Thanks for your comment. 🙂
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Oh gosh! I’m sorry to have misinterpreted it wrong!
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I’m not. I’m glad you did, because I went and re-read it and it was confusing. I think it is better now.
About Keira Knightly… I heard she did a topless photoshoot to protest extreme Photoshopping of published images and so, out of curiosity I looked it up. 🙂
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Oh okay 😀
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