I’ve been looking back at the web searches people used to find my blog during 2015.
The most popular was ‘honeyflow’, with ‘honey flow’ and ‘honeyflow.com/commercial’ also in the top 10 (the last demonstrating that some people prefer to enter urls into search engines rather than their address bar). I wrote a post about the Flow hive back in February: Will the honey flow for you?. There were so many variations on Flow hive searches to find my blog that I should thank the inventors for sending all those visitors my way!
At number 6 was ‘braula coeca’, a now rare honey bee pest. I believe this is probably not because a lot of people are looking for information on it but because there’s not a lot of information out there. If you write about a niche subject, there’s more chance people will find your content. I wrote about this funny little jockey in 2013: Honey bee pests, diseases and poisoning revision post: Braula coeca: the ‘bee louse’
Braulacoeca (top) compared to Varroa (right), Tropilaelaps (centre bottom) and Melittiphis (left). Courtesy The Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), Crown Copyright
People are also trying to find out about chilled brood, stone brood and husbandry methods like shook-swarms and the Bailey comb change. I would always recommend going to the National Bee Unit’s Beebase website for expert bee disease and husbandry information you can trust: nationalbeeunit.com – especially their free advisory leaflets, training manuals and fact sheets.
Some of my favourites were the more obscure searches:
pile of dead bluebottles in an old building
paw print plum blossom on snow
has any one experience of meeting warm sweet honey – yep, tastes best eaten straight from the hive
how a university research garden should look like
someone who passed the exam has not read the book (wonder how well they did)
a honey bee habit – many of us do have a bee addiction
show me some lovely elsa cakes please
Well ok – cakes made this week by a friend of Elsa’s, she kindly brought them down to the apiary for us – they were so delicious:
Unknown search terms: 10,726. Google has been encrypting the vast majority of search terms since 2013 – officially to protect user privacy, though funnily enough subscribers to Google AdWords get to see the terms. SearchEngineLand covered this in 2013 if you’re interested: Post-PRISM, Google Confirms Quietly Moving To Make All Searches Secure
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I used to check searches thinking I might be able to facilitate people finding my blog . . . I gave up and just enjoyed trying to figure out how strange stuff related to my blog. And yes, now I don’t see them anymore.
Nice write-up.
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Me too, just look at the stats for fun really. It’s not like I’m in this to make money.
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Mmm cakes. I came for the module advice and stayed for the cakes!
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Ha ha, thanks Di! Trying to work out whether to do more modules at the moment.
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Oh you should! What about number 7?
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Merry Christmas, Emily to you and your family. I hope your bees do well over winter. – Kourosh
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Thanks very much Kourosh, merry Christmas to you and Amelia and your lovely bees.
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Oh the things people do, or perhaps search. It will be interesting to see the news on the Flow hive come spring when they are supposed to start shipping. I look forward to your future post on the topic.
Enjoy!
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I’m not sure I’ll write about it again, but we shall see!
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I’m here for the cakes, but I’m not the only one it seems.
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New Years Resolution: more photos of cakes!
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Your post made me curious, so I checked mine. A few that got my attention:
what to do when my pig drinks motor oil Good question.
groundhog is mocking me Don’t you hate it when that happens?
is Haitians related to satan Only by marriage, I think.
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Yours are super bizarre. Hope that pig was ok.
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Oh yes – you’ve reminded me of the delights of bizarre search engine terms. As you say, most of mine come up as ‘Unknown’ these days so I hadn’t checked for a while. Merry Christmas!
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Merry Christmas to you too!
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Hi Emily
The other thing that makes entertaining reading are the filtered spam comments … I’d written about this in my own review of the year’s online activity (http://theapiarist.org/www-theapiarist-org-year/) before I saw this post. It’s amazing what some people waste their time with … though perhaps it’s all robot-generated?
Happy New Year
David
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Happy New Year David. Sometimes those spam comments are amazingly inventive. Occasionally you get some so vague and generic that it’s hard to tell if they are spam or not (for example “I am genuinely delighted to glance at this website post which contains lots of helpful facts”). I’ve learnt to be very suspicious of online flattery!
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I like looking at the searches and using them for posts. It does not surprise me you get some interesting searches. Good material here.
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