Why Certain Books Are Popular Searches
I started seeing lions everywhere.
Okay, not everywhere. They were just among the topics of the top book searches at isbn.nu. I have a page that shows me and anyone else who cares the most recent 10 searches and (since I added this a few days ago) the top 10 searches since the database for popularity was reset.
This has helped me understand how the Internet works a little better, as I can explain the source of the popularity of some of these links.
How to Have Sex in the Woods. Many people search Yahoo asking "how to have sex"--there's nothing about the woods in there at all. The book price page on my site is the #11 answer to this question.
101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site. One spammer trick is to flood your site with referrals. They hope that you either review or publish your statistics, thus increasing their Google Whuffie. This book was highly "promoted" by get-rich-quick sites through referral spam. It doesn't have anything to do with the quality or nature of the book; I suspect it's just a random link choice.
Dollar Bill Origami. Sounds like a cool book, but folks arrive here because they're searching on dollar bill origami over at Google. I did not know so many people were interested in folding dollar bills.
Endangered Tigers. Google thinks I know something about this topic.
Rapid Application Development with Mozilla. A single page on RDF links to where to find prices for one book. And it provokes dozens of clickthroughs. Must be a popular page.
Quarkexpress 6: For Print and Web Design. The program name is misspelled in this iteration of the book title in my database. It should be QuarkXPress. That extra 'e' in the middle means that Google points folks to me whenever they mis-search on Quark's flagship program.
Lions: Life in the Pride and The African Lion: This one flummoxed me until I found that these two books and links to my site were used as part of an example in "Representing Classes As Property Values on the Semantic Web." I wrote the author telling her how amusing I thought this random traffic was! She was apologetic, and I said I did not mind: the more people that find my site, the better.
Finally, an old favorite, Susie Bright's book Mommy's Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn, and Cherry Pie. She's a fantastic writer. But why me? (Or rather, why isbn.nu?) The answer is, unfortunately, horrible. Searches on "little girl porn" lead one to my price service's doorstep. I feel like putting up a custom page for those referrers--not for this book--"Y'oughta be ashamed of yourselves, pervs!"