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…

2 thoughts on “attack of the 800-pound gorillas

  1. 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… :)

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