attack of the 800-pound gorillas

Here’s another strange blog artefact. I’ve mentioned before how “odd searches bring people to this site”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000496.html. One of the popular search terms has been *tiananmen*, which leads searchers to a “brief note commemorating the 1989 massacre”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000327.html. It consistently gets 300 or so hits per month, while other top search terms average 20.

When Google started “censoring searches from China”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/29/googlecn_tibetans_pr.html, though, that number exploded. Traffic to the site has tripled in the past few days, with 5000 searches for tiananmen landing on that bit of a page. Apparently, “tiananmen square”:http://www.google.com/search?q=tiananmen+square was used as the most obvious query Google is blocking.

The strangest part of all this is that I can’t even find that page in the Google search results. Think of what the traffic might be if it showed up on the first page…

Posted by Chris in Blog on January 31st, 2006

2 Responses to “attack of the 800-pound gorillas”

  1. Karen, on February 1st, 2006 at 1:54 pm Said:

    Wow. 5000? There aren’t even any naked people on your site.

    Maybe you should start putting lots of anti-Bush, pro-choice, big-font messages in the static headlines, to take advantage of the traffic while it lasts… :)

  2. Chris, on February 3rd, 2006 at 11:34 am Said:

    OK, figured it out:

    1. Go to “images.google.com”:http://images.google.com.

    2. Search for “tiananmen”.

    3. Click on the first image in the search.

    4. Welcome back!

    …and that’s why I’m getting 1500 hits a day on that page.

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