[Y]ou will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
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To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby!A commenter to Ng's original post also suggests scoring a point for each of the total hits a phrase returns. So without prompting of any kind, I accept the challenge, and I'll include total hit counts as well as links to the individual posts that feature the phrases. Eschewing quotation marks, here are five phrases that -- on October 29, 2007 -- turn up the Chatham Rabbit blog as the first hit in a Google search:
1. chatham rabbit, 273,000 hits, links to the home page
2. chicken eats flies, 1,720,000 hits, "Chicken Eats Flies" (1913)
3. treacly ante-bellum, 195 hits, Erasing the Stone Tape
4. one of the most disgraceful acts of vandalism, 76,600 hits, The Monument 3: Symbol
5. character impersonations, humorous songs, 473,000 hits, Vaudeville comes to Pittsboro (1909-1910)
I also found it interesting that the phrase shower of blood fell around her turned up, as #2, this blog's home page and tommy yum's High Strangeness: Blood Fall (1884), behind the anomalist's article which describes the very same incident. And yet, tommy yum quotes the passage precisely from the Chatham RECORD article while the anomalist only echoes it. Hit #4 for shower of blood fell around her links in a Google books version of the poems of Ossian, containing this rather terrifying passage:
The night passed away in song; morning returned in joy. The mountains showed their gray heads; the blue face of ocean smiled. The white wave is seen tumbling round the distant rock; a mist rose slowly from the lake. It came in the figure of аn aged man along the silent plain. Its large limbs did not move in steps, for a ghost supported it in mid air. It came towards Selma's hall and dissolved in a shower of blood .Which seems to portend the death of the people. Wow, I'll be seeing that one in my sleep tonight. But I digress! Hurrah for Old Capt. Crump's yardbird earning the #1 Google standing for the phrase chicken eats flies over more than 1,700,000 hits. She may have died suddenly, but her memory lives on for everyone who enters chicken eats flies into Google.
2 comments:
So, I take it that "chicken eats flies" is the new "shower of blood."
Oh well. Back to the drawing board.
I will say that "merrily led the blasphemous parade" from my post "High Strangeness: Against Tramping" earned 16,900 hits
and "chased by a trash-can shaped object" from "High Strangeness: Watch the Skies!" garnered a vaguely impressive 18,800.
But "chicken eats flies" they ain't. Alas.
Time to write a post called "Jumping the Big-Breasted Shark."
Don't feel sad tommy yum. I have an unfair advantage -- Henry A. London wrote three of the passages from my posts, and the fourth was the title of the blog. Notice for example how, from "'Chicken Eats Flies' (1913)", the phrase pet chicken dead comes in fourth on Google, out of 2,030,000 hits. The man had a gift. Of course, shower of blood fell around her is his also.
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