Google Love

If you're already a blogger, you know that there's a page you can check to see how people get to your blog. I'll put a link to it here so the uninitiated can check it out. You can click on each of the links on the referrer page and figure out exactly how people found the blog. If they found you through a search engine like Google, you can even tell what search term they used. "Carpet Worms," for some reason, is a popular search term that leads to an entry in my blog about worms sliding under an office door and dying on the carpet. I'm not sure what people are actually searching for when they type in "carpet worms"--could it be the name of a band? a grubby little creature that infests carpet? a video game?--but carpet worm seekers are welcome here anyway.

So yesterday I was checking out my referrers and reading all the Google search terms that led people to the blog, when I came across this one: "I love Amy Stewart."

Awwwww.

I ran downstairs to my husband's office (have you met my husband Scott, editor of OP Magazine and rare book dealer?) and said, "Honey, did you Google me today?"

He had not. "Well," I said, "If you had, this would have been a very clever way to send me a love note." After all, the search term you put in has to actually work--it has to turn up a link to the blog, and the searcher has to click the link and get to the blog, for it to register on my referrer page. And I'd have to check the referrer page that day, something that, really and truly, I do not do obsessively all day long.

Scott was sorry he had not thought of it first. But he made up for it: next time I checked the referrer page I found Scott's response in another Google search: "I love Amy Stewart, not you."

Take that, you anonymous, amorous Googler.