Some fun with search criteria

Now that the clock has passed midnight here and it’s officially the first day of 2012, I’d like to drink in a bit of the spirit of the strange New Year’s resolutions that people occasionally make, and do something on the light side for a change. The usual fabulous nature photographs that have taken take your breath away lo these eight months and have made so many of you want to elect me president of the United States (or whatever other country you live in) and put me in your will as sole beneficiary will resume tomorrow.

—————————————–

After I’d been hosting my other blog for a while, I became aware of some of the strange (to me) phrases that people had searched for in their browsers and that had brought them to one of my entries. Because WordPress provides me with a list of all those search strings, I can now have a little fun by showing you some of the phrases that led to this native plant photography blog over the eight months of its existence. I’m impressed with the way search engines can decipher mangled spellings, but I also have to ding search engines a few points for bringing people here when I don’t have anything that matches what the searchers were after.

For better or worse — and mostly worse — here are some of the things that people have searched for that led them to this blog; any comments of mine appear indented under the search strings:

people leaf

I’ve got a beard, but as far as I know, no people have leaves.

leaf of people tree

Here it was again, a few months later. I’m beginning to wonder if the searchers meant a poplar tree, whose genus is Populus, which coincidentally means ‘people’ in Latin.

if its in amber is it living

It’s rather hard for something to keep breathing when it’s encased in amber.

climp means

My online dictionary says “No entries found.” Then it asks “Did you mean?”, followed by this list: “blimp, chimp, clamp, climb, clip, clomp, clump, crimp, limp.” Take your pick.

gosts

gohsts

how do i noticing guest

I don’t know. How do you noticing guest?

the wind of sun flower

Maybe we can tap into sunflower wind as a renewable resource.

plant a feather

If you can plant a feather and get it to grow, I’d like to know about it.

sunflowers in back of truck

In one post I mentioned a truck depot, but that post doesn’t have the word sunflower in it.

eduard mottled

I hope Éduard got over his attack of mottling.

flower store hours austin

My online store of flower pictures is open for viewing 24 hours a day.

fresh shout outs on plants are curled up

Did the person mean “sprouts” or perhaps “shoots”?

a weed with union like stem with a white flower

Make that onion-like.

nature hesay

What’d he say?

what is the spanish word for alamo

The Spanish word for alamo is alamo.

family portraits at the alamo

I don’t think the person bargained for portraits of wildflower families.

burning sycamore leaves -bad for you

And it’s bad for the leaves, too, especially if they’re still on the tree.

show me pichers of wildflowers

Yup, I showed you “pichers” of wildflowers all right.

orange stripped caterpillar

This blog is PG: no stripping allowed.

suflower syalk

The search engine miraculously deciphered this as sunflower stalk.

preaky pear internal structure

And the search engine deciphered this as prickly pear.

wildflowers that show up after rainrain lillies

This blogblog has shown manymany.

purple plus white is blue

Although the claim is dubious, it led to the post entitled “Red, white, and blue—plus purple.”

клематис цветок фото [Klematis tsvetók foto, meaning ‘Clematis flower photo’]

Someone searching in Russian for a picture of a Clematis flower was brought to a Clematis drummondii in Texas.

fash climbing clematis

I showed pictures of climbing Clematis, but I never said how “fash” it grows (nor did I say that for me this plant never goes out of fashion).

daun pohon elm

Huh?

cedre fulla

Huh?

mexican hat places in kerrvill tx

My guess is that the person was looking for real hats from Mexico in Kerrville, not the flower called Mexican hat.

cyprus plant grows out of wall

This led not to the island of Cyprus but to a post about bald cypress.

bald cypress growing in new york

I guess if you were on the moon Austin would look like a suburb of New York, wouldn’t it?

lamatis clouds

The search engine interpreted that first word as Clematis, but I have no idea what the searcher intended.

illinois tollway

Neither of those two words appears in any entry anywhere in this blog.

mountain of bud

green leaves

I just tried a search for “green leaves” and got over 33 million hits. I’m honored to have been among the top hits that the searcher must have gotten—unless he read through a good chunk of the 33 million before getting to one of my posts.

i have drunk, and seen the spider

This struck me as bizarre, but in doing a search I found out that it’s a line from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I’ve shown a few pictures of spiders in this blog, but none of them have had anything to do with drinking, although it’s true that spiders can only take their food in liquid form.

thelondonflowerlover

somehowledtomyblogintexas.

sunflower is ?

I think a sunflower is a kind of flower.

what is the scientific name for the macro plant

I have plenty of macro photographs of plants but I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a macro plant.

why are a lot of my macro shots blurry?

Probably because you don’t hold your camera steady enough.

i have seen large purple flowers on bindweed what plant is this

I think the purple flowers on bindweed are from the plant called bindweed.

i just cant get enough schwartzmann

Honestly, I didn’t make that up; I wouldn’t misspell my last name.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman (with one n at the end)