More from the Search Engine Oracle

You’ve probably read about Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Google blacking out services today to bring attention to legislation they say may adversely affect their mission to distract people from doing any real work. After reading Wikipedia’s explanation of the SOPA and PIPA legislation, I still wasn’t sure which hyper-irrational side of the story to believe, but today seemed like a good day to celebrate the Internet’s misinformation campaign of sending me searchers who in no way, shape, or form were looking for my website.

My favorite search terms are those that pique my curiosity. They offer a snippet of a story, the beginning, middle, or end, but it’s left to my imagination to fill in the missing pieces. For example:

Uh-oh, Steve.

If my name had been Steve, this search term would have made me nervous, something akin to finding, “Look out behind you, Paul!” I wonder if this could be connected to my previous search engine post which included the search term:

stalk you steve

It’s possible a reader entered the ‘Uh-oh’ in response to the news about the stalker. I’m hoping to get a third Steve-related search term that may fill in the missing blanks.

I receive frequent ethics inquiries, probably resulting from a Dear Good Greatsby post responding to Laura of Unlikely Explanations wondering about a possibly deceased neighbor:

what do i do if my neighbor killed his wife?

It seems like the answer should be obvious, but I assume any hesitancy must come from one of the following reasons:

You’re stealing cable from his box and you worry if the police take him away and a new family moves in, they might discontinue HBO. You’d like to turn in your neighbor, but you’d prefer to wait until after the next season of Game of Thrones debuts in April.

The investigating police might discover the secret camera you installed in your neighbor’s bathroom.

You don’t condone murder but you’ve come to appreciate how quiet the neighborhood seems since the two of them stopped arguing all hours of the night.

I start every day by asking myself the following question:

is anyone secretly inlove with me?

At the end of each week I compile a list of everyone I know and then rank them according to their potential secret love for me. If the same name tops the list for three consecutive weeks, I test my theory by sending this person a list of expensive gifts I might like. If you see me wearing the signed roller skates Olivia Newton John wore in Xanadu, you’ll know I’ve got a secret admirer.

It’s been eight months since the royal wedding but the search engine gods still consider me an expert:

william and kate never touch eachother

I think this pertains to the custom that the royal couple can’t touch each other during the wedding ceremony.  I’m 90% certain they can touch after the wedding, although when I tried to confirm this with the happy couple I was warned never to come within 500 yards of Kate again, so it appears the royals are indeed picky about being touched.

Once again somebody is trying to steal my name:

good gretasby

Who is this Greta? At first I was jealous of this female, German rip-off of my name, but I lived in Germany for many years and I can assure you they did not find me funny. I don’t expect Greta to have much luck adapting my moxie for a German audience.

I continue to receive odd searches related to my post about nude celebrities–which contained no pictures of nude celebrities:

websites where you can post naked photos of yourself

I’m pretty sure such websites exist but I can’t make a specific recommendation. Go ahead and send any naked photos of yourself to my email and I’ll forward them to that website if I ever figure it out.

I once wrote a post about tricking your wife into delaying plans to have kids, but not all husbands have the same viewpoint:

how to convince your wife to not have a baby

how to convince your wife to have a baby

It sounds like both these men are married to the wrong people. If they had submitted questions to the Dear Good Greatsby page, I would have recommended some sort of trade.

And last but certainly not least:

i peed and pooped in my bikini

I wonder what this searcher was hoping to find. The verbs are in the past-tense so at this point the damage to the bikini has been done. The fact that she’s at a computer makes me wonder if the accident took place before she left for the beach and she’s wondering if she should change first before going. The answer is yes.

If she’s already at the beach, I would suggest she swim to another beach far away from her fiance’s family reunion and take the bus home.

If the search term had been in the future-tense “I will pee and poop in my bikini,” I would have recommended another party trick for getting attention, like being eaten by a shark.

If the terms had been in the present, “I am peeing and pooping in my bikini,” the most obvious advice would be to stop.