One of the things I like about blogging is looking through the various search terms people used which lead them to my blog. For example, I just noticed this page from the University of Washington which links to my post on testing ASP.NET applications using Selenium. That’s pretty cool. dasBlog has an Activities page that lists Referrer Urls which is where I found the above link.
On the same page is a list of Internet Search results where I can see what keywords people, mostly from Google, used to find my content. The keywords link back to the original search page so I can click through and view where my content ended up in the search results as well as see other related content. Here is what that list looks like on the admin pages of my blog:
For example, take the search results for "setting up delphi build machine". I can see my post was in the top five.
Granted, for people who already blog this isn’t likely to be all that exciting as many blog engines includes such features however, I do think it’s interesting to see how other people search for content.
One last point, I find it more than a little spooky how completely Google controls search. I’d guess Google accounts for all but a few percent of Internet searches on my blog which means they could effectively shut my blog down.