2001-03-20

10:11:55 PM

• How meta is it? Longtime reader Simone Fluter sent word of one of the strangest sites you'll visit all week. Disturbing Search Requests has been making the rounds of the Web logs -- a weblogs.com search indicates that the site is linked from 32 blogs at present, and in another hour it will be 33 -- and has had one writeup in a more mainstream venue, the Village Voice.

  Web site owners -- mostly bloggers -- contribute odd items from their referrer logs. Usually they add diverting commentary and a link or two. Behind each post is a Net surfer who arrived at the blogger's site after issuing some curious and worrisome search. For example, what was the person who sought spanking and jedi hoping to find, exactly? Probably not the site (RedDwarf) whose proprietor dropped a dime to DSR.

  Some bloggers really get into the spirit of the thing. Meg Pickard of not.so.soft is one of those; she has submitted no fewer than 115 strange searches since last fall. Meg has also documented one of the highest-order meta uses of a search string yet catalogued. In this blog entry she notes that someone visited her site from the results page of a Google search for the plaint, "meg, i've fallen in love with you on not.so.soft."