After a few days off, I’m back at the wheel. Logging into the admin panel of this blog, I was greeted with an odd graphic.
Initially, I thought traffic had really taken a nose-dive, but that tower was just making our normally small traffic look even smaller. Puzzled at the influx of pageviews, especially on a Sunday, I did some digging.
Turns out the main source of all those pageviews was Yahoo Image Search, specifically image searches for the keyword “cursveletters,” yes, misspelled, which as you can see, returns an image hosted here for this post on infographics as the third result.
Weird, right? I just hope this doesn’t result in a ton of hotlinking. Just to be sure, I cross-checked with Google Analytics, and sure enough, Yahoo Image Search was the big source of traffic on Sunday, same keywords and everything.
What I can’t figure out is what drove people to search for “cursveletters” letters on Sunday. Or perhaps a single event wasn’t the driver, but rather a change or glitch in Yahoo’s Image Search algorithm raised the rank of this blog momentarily, garnering a portion of the many searches for “cursveletters.”
There’s an odd butterfly effect at work here that is interesting to me.
Anyway, I like this kind of mystery because it shows the humanity in front of the device that you sometimes lose sight of when you think about the Internet. Above all, the Internet tends to mirror human behavior, and it’s a very good way to study people.
Thoughts? Find the comments.
Are you sure the internet isn’t mirroring bot behavior?
Oh right. I don’t believe in bots.