Welcome to My World

This may sound like a lame excuse, but the only real reason I bother putting Google AdSense ads on my site is for the interesting reporting and analytical tools I get out of it for free. They haven’t actually paid me anything since 2006, where the site unexpectedly earned a $100 kickback for actually convincing a new advertiser to sign up. Oh, there have been earnings since then, but in nearly 2 full years it hasn’t even come close to that magic $100 mark where they’ll actually send the money to me.

Much more interesting than the non-existent revenue I get from the site are the statistics and information Google gives me. My webhost’s log analyzer gives me other important information (I check once or twice a month now for sites that hit mine with lots of requests or pull tons of data, and blacklist them if they’re not a search engine (a “real” one … sorry, startups) or my own workstation), but Google’s analytics are very fun to study.

One thing people don’t realize when they do certain things related to my site is that I can see them do it. No, this doesn’t mean I track visitors or anything nefarious; it just means that there are certain things (especially search terms, but also page load patterns and such) that happen from time to time that tell me certain idiots are still keeping tabs on me here and there just to see if I’ve done anything worthy of litigation. I truly relish nuzzling right up against that line while steering clear of actual problems.

When you punch in a search up there in the little “Search” box at top-left (at the time of this writing, anyway) and click “Google Search,” Google runs your search as specified, but remembers it. It doesn’t remember anything about you, it just stores the query. In my Google AdSense reporting interface, I can see the most popular searches entered into the box. So if you’re actually stupid enough to come straight to my site and use its own search box to see if I’ve mentioned a “naughty word,” I’m going to notice you’ve done it.

There are two entities of interest here, and just to continue to piss them off immensely I’m not actually going to name them at all. One is a person. I have actually asserted (and tested) my right to call her a shameless, homewrecking whore on this very blog, as she was the idiot who I rented a room from briefly when I first moved to Florida, and who threw me out (5 months into a 12 month lease) and sued me for all sorts of stupid things. In her suit, she actually quoted bits of my blog (I’m published! Woohoo! ) to try to demonstrate … well, I don’t think we ever actually figured out what her point was in quoting me, since I was pretty honest in open court about my distaste for the woman, her (lack of) moral fiber, and her disgusting behavior. The judge even mentioned the blog as he asked me some “devil’s advocate” questions at the end of the hearing. He was as unimpressed with her arguments as I was. Anyway, since the court ruled in my favor in that case, I found it to be a pretty clear indication that the courts aren’t going to stomp on my First Amendment right to dish dirt about the skank.

In her case, what made me take notice was seeing her AIM screen name turn up in a series of queries on the site in recent months. Just three, but “more than zero” is of interest since I don’t mention the cow by name at all within these pages and haven’t for nearly 2 years. Seeing that gave me cause to go do a little digging, and I chuckled really hard when I saw that her house in Palm Bay (the one I rented a room in) was foreclosed on late last year — I had known she had run back home to mommy & daddy once she realized her hard-headed attitude (and the fact that she didn’t actually know who the father of her baby was) had led her down a path she couldn’t handle on her own, but I hadn’t thought very much about whether she’d try to actually keep her job or not. Either she walked away from that mortgage in Florida or she just couldn’t make those payments, but I know she had been trying to sell that sucker since a month or so after I moved out in 2006. I remember watching the house’s price plummet and the listings grow more and more desperate. Good job, moron — you bore an actual bastard child whose father is either the married guy you were shtoinking or the single guy with kids who said he didn’t want more, moved back in with your parents (at 30 years old) in another state to get free help raising it, lost (or gave up) your house, but you’re still Googling yourself here to see if I’ve said anything “naughty.”

The other entity of interest is the company that sued me late in 2006 (ye gods, November and December of 2006 were litigious months for me, eh?), who mysteriously offered a remarkably generous (not lucrative, as in “cash,” but remarkably self-destructive on their part and cost-free on mine) settlement when I succeeded in raising three very interesting questions/objections with the court, by mail, on my own. It was amazing how fucking fast their lawyers contacted me to offer a settlement once the court set a hearing date for my complaints.

What’s interesting about them is no less than 18 queries have turned up on my site this year, of varying combinations of the terms that make up the company’s name, and/or its founder(s), sometimes combined with derogatory terms. Either they’re doing the searches themselves, or people out there at random are trying to search my site for the “missing content” that was the subject of the litigation to begin with. If it’s the latter, I’m proud that the message the company unsuccessfully tried to kill is still going strong, in the form of cynicism and skepticism about what the company claims it can do for its clients. It makes me smile to think that people dig deep to figure these guys out when they approach someone.

In my limited digging on them of late, I couldn’t help but laugh my ass off that the company has completely rebranded itself, shifting away from the name it used when I was one of its clients, when I complained publicly about it, and when it sued me. That name still appears in very small fine print on the company’s web page (and its “old” domain still works), but what’s more interesting to me is they’re acting like the company, using that new name (which seems to have first appeared just a year or so ago) has been around for fifteen years. There are the same, sad sales pitches scattered here and there (these people are very easy to recognize), and even the phrasing hasn’t changed (neither has their “roster of stars,” which should tell you something about how lousy they are at attracting new high-profile “clients”), but they all use the new name now. Could it be that our little dispute actually motivated them to change their fucking name, just so searches on their name didn’t show the less-than-rosy first page full of hits they got with the old name? Heh.

It’s scary to think, but I actually accomplished a little bit of good over the past two years with these two separate entities. I taught one that you can’t just walk into small claims court, lie through your teeth, and expect to walk away with a judgment for thousands of dollars. I taught her I wasn’t quite the sucker she thought I was, and I taught her I’d seen through all her tricks and lies.

I taught the other that even the broke, low-rent suckers like me who occasionally fall for scams won’t back down when it comes time to bark loudly to the world about how the scam worked. The company’s court filing suggested that my original writeup about it actually did deter at least a few people from getting suckered. To those people I saved: “you’re welcome.” And apparently I taught that lesson to them well enough that they decided it would be easier/cheaper to change their fucking brand than to try to prove what I said about them was wrong (because it wasn’t).

I have no way of proving that these people are at all involved in these searches, but it just “feels” right that they’d be doing it. The woman is such an egotistical maniac that it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find she’s still actively reading this blog. And I wouldn’t put it past the company in question to have somebody within its bowels occasionally skim the web for signs of activity from me they could litigate on (that’s a very easy problem to avoid — the terms of our settlement are remarkably clear and incredibly easy for me to comply with).

There’s Other Weird Searches Too

Moving beyond that little ball of idiots, I want to briefly look at the other searches that come through the site on a somewhat frequent basis.

I’ve often wondered how the hell my article Another Dose of Common Sense is as popular as it is. It is, by far, the most-viewed node on the entire site (a node can be a blog entry, an article, a news item, a “page,” a category, a topic, or whatever), and the funny thing is, while it was a decent rant, it wasn’t what I’d consider to be my best writing.

The next-most-popular article, It’s “Dress Up Like a Whore” Day!, is easier to explain. There’s plenty of searches on my site for things like “dressing like a whore,” “dress up a whore,” “dress up whore,” “dress like a whore,” “women who dress nasty showing skin,” and “whore dress,” and it’s clear Google is sending people to that page. That one makes sense. Amusingly, I’m the top result for “dress up like a whore” on Google, whether you use quotes around it or not. Heh! I don’t get it — I thought the point with whores was to undress them … sigh.

I can’t explain the Common Sense one, though.

Another amusing set of searches tells me that at least six people wonder why employees (of some random, unspecified company) write down your license plate number after you walk out. Just from that very vague description, the picture I get in my head is a car dealer writing down someone’s license plate after a failed haggling session to buy a new car. It makes sense that they’d do what they could to follow up with you, even if you made it clear you didn’t want to. DMV records are public, and not expensive to get hold of (scary, ain’t it?). From your license plate number, a dealer can, pretty cheaply, figure out what exact car you drive, where it’s registered, where its owner lives, and a damned good guess at what it’s actually worth. A pushy salesman might actually call (or show up in person) to suggest trading in the old clunker while it’s still worth something (and offer a number that is less than the owner wants but is probably tempting enough to renew interest). One that did that to me would be shown the door rather unceremoniously, but I imagine it works on some people.

There some fairly geeky searches, which encourages me a little bit — the limited geeky stuff I post is actually reaching some eyeballs and not just some computers