Friday, October 07, 2011

Nothing about ants here, please move on

The blogger statistics are telling me that 270 people have come to this site this year searching for information about ants.  This easily beats the next popular search term, "existential import" (128 searches).  Puzzling in light of the fact that the ranking of this blog for 'ant' on a Google search is about 200th.

I mentioned this oddity before, but I think I now understand the reason.  Of all the 10 billion people in the world, about 128 are interested in existential import.  Since few other blogs or sites have anything about this, all those 128 people have ended up here.  By contrast, probably 60 million of the world's population have some interest in ants - perhaps they like to fry them and eat them, or perhaps they got stung.  Of those 60 million, only 270 managed to get through the 20 or so Google pages before they found this blog.  I.e. everyone who looks for existential import, finds it here.  Only a tiny tiny fraction of the people looking for information about ants will get to here.  But a tiny fraction of a very large number is a number for all that.

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