David's World

August 20, 2005

Blog searches

One of the most common use of search engines is to look for oneself: "About one in four Internet users has typed their own names into a search engine", finds a recent study conducted by an American research center. Men are more likely to check up on what others think about them.

Not so on my blog: strikingly common search key words are the names of women that played and play a role in my life. What do I write about them? Disappointingly, it's usually not much that is to find here. No nasty good-bye-letters, no naked people (check back later!).

Other searches seem to look for projects that I once published on the Internet. A lot of people look for Heiner Müller, an important German dramatist about whom I've written a paper Heiner Müller im Spiegel der Nachrufe in 1996. Another paper people look for was just a little class presentation about The Death of Roland Barthes' author, titled A Short Absence of the Author. Always good to know that I once used very different methods of looking at knowledge and language than through the directed graphs and trees and constraints and Markov models that I'm more familiar with nowadays!

Sometimes, people get to my page because they think I've written about them, and then they search this blog for their names. The reason for this is that I have a few lists of bogus names on the web. That was a fun project to see whether how easy it is to generate such names (using publicly available census data). People think they've found themselves, because their name popped up randomly. By the way - each of these names I've linked to a randomly generated, but seemingly realistic e-mail address in order to "Spam the Spambots": these entries generate a lot of crappy data in the big databases of people that send out unwanted advertisements per e-mail. Such databases are generated automatically from random web sites - such as this one.