Saturday 10 July 2010

The scattergun effect!

One of the most annoying things about searching on the internet is the way a search for a specific subject or topic will produce a ton of unrelated material which, because of the way it's indexed, takes the right constituent pieces but puts them together in the wrong order.

To give an example, I usually check out which of my Flickr photos have been viewed the most, and how people found them. It's not much more than idle curiosity on my part, but it's a bit of an indication of the sort of stuff that it's probably not worth bothering to upload. Most searching seems to give fairly predictable results, but the one that caught my eye yesterday was "hairy beach stud" - and this is what they found:

It's an old polaroid holiday snap from the 1980s, and the caption reads: "On the beach with Sweep (the dog)- Me in tight jeans and DM boots with our first dog - a nice hairy one named Sweep. I was the envy of all the local lads in those boots: the 14-hole ones had only just come out and they all wanted to know where I'd got them from."

So the "beach" came from the title, the "hairy" from the subtitle, and the "stud" from the 'studded' tag I used to label the studded leather belt I was wearing. But rather obviously (or so I think, anyway) neither of us really fits the description of a hairy beach stud!

Ah well.... life is full of its little disappointments for someone.

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