I’m amused to read that someone is finding angel’s weblog not by remembering the URL, but by searching google for things like “accidentally snapping her head off her body”, “accidentally snapping her head off”, and “snapping her head off” not accidentally.

Apart from worrying about the fact that there are just a few too many results for the non-accidental head-snapping search result (the Internet once more proves to be a scary place), I think there is definite mileage in this. There’s no real need to have a catchy URL – if you could even get one these days – all you really need to help people find your website is an easily-remembered English phrase and Google.

Funnily enough, only the other day I was talking to Pete about this, and he told me that, rather than remembering the URL for this site, he just sticks brain surgeon’s salary into google. As Paste Magazine proudly occupies the number one search result for said phrase, it’s much easier for him to find us with than using the URL. We achieved this result without even trying as well – I might start using the phrase randomly and see what happens (without the apostrophe, we are languishing way down in second place, so something must be done about that for a start).

The whole brain surgeon thing started, for me, as a bit of a joke – it was just one of those random search strings that kept showing up in the logs (and continues to – already this month a significant portion of our referrals have come from people looking for information about this fascinating topic). The phrase originally appeared on this site in this story, and some time later I put together a page about some of the random search strings that were causing people to stumble across the site. Now, bizarrely, the original page has dropped out of the google results altogether, and it is the pages talking about the fact that we rank unusually high for a search on something wholly inappropriate that show up when we get the top result.

At the same time, we’ve dropped down to fourth in a search for creative writing magazine. That’s probably a fair reflection on the amount of new creative writing that’s going on around here these days, though.

If you can’t bookmark the site, then some of the other strings that you might like to search for to get back here include:
– ralph nader suing ali g

– kings of leon copy protection
– top 20 crappest towns
– serving fuckwits. Thanks, again, to Pete for sending me that one in an email entitled “Paste Magazine: Serving Fuckwits”. Seems rather appropriate somehow.

Then again, maybe I should buy a new catchier domain name. This site provides a list of English-language words that are still available as domain names. I notice that www.off-key.com, www.self-indulgence.org and www.low-end.com are all currently available.