Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Weird Blog Stuff

This has been going on for weeks.

When I check my stat counter, which I do with some obsessive frequency, now that I have discovered how many people read without commenting and have, indeed, turned into such a person myself, I find an increasingly number of hits originating from the urls of photographs I have used -- particularly photos from various landmarks in France and, oddly, of a Six Feet Under photo I used one day. It feels really weird, and I am tempted to delete all such images.

Anyone know what gives? Is this a consequence of the google purchase of blogger ~ are we now subject to innumerable searches by folks who aren't actually looking for blogs? Or is there just one person out there clicking on every St. Chappelle and Six Feet Under reference in the stratosphere of the internet? Should we care?

10 comments:

Unknown said...

I've noticed the same thing too and I don't have my blog through blogger. It must have something to do with google's caching of images.

Gannet Girl said...

What does that mean, "caching of images?"

I should be online about as much as I should be driving a car. I understand the internet about as much as I understand underthehood.

Lori said...

Oh GG, all the things we use that we don't understand, besides the car:
T.V.
Microwaves
Cell Phones
Husbands

I suspect cache in this sense is the actual place, or server, where Google collects every one of our images that's on our blog so that we don't have to save them in our computer memory.

Waterfall said...

Yes, I think it's a google-caching thing. I checked my sitemeter a couple of weeks ago and am still getting lots of hits through google searches, even though I haven't posted regularly in a while.

Unknown said...

I mean Google is going around and checking out websites, capturing images and their website locations so that it can offer that information when folks do an image search on their website.

Anonymous said...

I know that I check your blog fairly regularly for updates as I'm unaware of a way to receive notification when you've put up a new post. I know that doesn't address the photo hit issue but thought I'd mention it anyway!

Cynthia said...

I get a lot of image searches for my blog header!not the blog itself, but the image Jodi used in making my header. How strange is that?

Wil said...

Google Images (as well as Yahoo Images) have little software spiders that "crawl" the web, looking for images. They then collect the URL's and store them in a big database which is searchable by keyword. So if you want a photo of a yarmulke, for instance, you put that into the search field and up pops pages and pages of thumbnails of photos which somehow reference a yarmulke!

Ain't technology grand?

Gannet Girl said...

So there are spiders crawling around my blog?

I tried a couple of searches yesterday and sure enough, a couple of my own images came up.

Mark Smith said...

I posted once on the virtues and experience of using a particular colonoscopy prep. (All is well, by the way)

Now I get at least 6 or 7 hits EVERY NIGHT from people looking for information on that prep. I even got a thank you for posting it the other day.

You never know what people will find when they search.