Search Is Weird (A Found Poem)

This is just bizarre. I was browsing through my site statistics, looking at the search terms people use to get here: poets, poetics, php–reasonable stuff. Then once in awhile a phrase would pop out that has nothing to do with this site. I’m sure the searchers were as disappointed as I am amused. I jotted down a few of them, then realized I could arrange them into a kind of found poem. Each line links to the page that came up in the search for that phrase, and if you hover over the link you can see how the linked page placed in Google for that phrase (as of writing this, anyway).

i hate billy collins
smoking out
emotional poems on 911
poems with the word fairy in them
does popularity matter?

Indeed.

10 Comments

  1. Posted October 30, 2006 at 9:05 am | Permalink

    Hilarious. I get some really funny ones too.

    proverbs of hell for dummies
    bitchy poems
    does the nose stop growing?
    losers
    squirrel whisperer

    …hmmmm

  2. Robert
    Posted October 30, 2006 at 9:11 am | Permalink

    Aw, nuts! I SO wanted to corner the market on “bitchy poems.” Well, we can’t all have everything…

  3. Posted October 30, 2006 at 6:48 pm | Permalink

    Got to wonder how google works sometimes. :)

    I got
    “poem half a page long worth an A”
    That gave me a chuckle.

  4. Robert
    Posted October 30, 2006 at 10:48 pm | Permalink

    Wow. Poignant chuckle that someone would search for a poem to plagiarize to get a grade. Seems more pathetic than plagiarizing prose somehow. And also pathetic to grade someone’s poem. Then again, I suppose in a way every publication, award, and MFA application is assigning a kind of grade to the poems they consider. Well, now I’ve just depressed myself.

  5. Robert
    Posted November 5, 2006 at 1:44 am | Permalink

    You just won’t believe it. As a result of this comment thread, which includes the phrase “bitchy poems” twice (and now a third time), I am now the #2 search result for this phrase. Almost makes me want to write one, to give the people what they want…

  6. Robert
    Posted November 5, 2006 at 1:50 am | Permalink

    And as a result of this very post, someone found this particular entry by searching on the phrase, “disappointing things in life – poems.” The depression continues…

  7. Posted November 5, 2006 at 9:17 pm | Permalink

    Mine from today is:
    What are freckles?
    journal paper
    revision notes
    on Sylvia Plath
    Bell Jar

    Thanks for dropping by Loose Leaf today.

  8. Posted November 5, 2006 at 9:19 pm | Permalink

    Oops. The last line should be “bell jewery.” That was an understandable mistake!

  9. Robert
    Posted November 5, 2006 at 9:22 pm | Permalink

    Ha! Long live free association. Thanks to you for stopping by. Search cracks me up. If Google were a person, she’d be very confused.

  10. Robert
    Posted December 16, 2006 at 6:45 pm | Permalink

    And thanks to this post, I am now getting referrals from people searching for – you guessed it – “weird poems.”

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