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CENTER

<h2>
Interesting Search Strings Which Lead Here
</h2>

-or-

<h2>
Refer Madness
</h2>

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<p>
Once upon a time I was looking through the logs for my home page and
I noticed that some people were getting to my page due to searches
in the various web search engines.  A lot of them had to do with
certain sexual subjects, mostly because of my last name and some other
amusing false hits or double meanings.

<p>
<b>Technical Note:</b>
I often get asked "How do you capture the search strings people use?"
In short, when you do a search using many search engines, your search
string is encoded in the URL.  Since my page is actually filtered through
a program (that's also how it knows which browser you were using and
which number visitor your are), the program also gets the URL you just
came from and can do various things with it.  If a search string is
present, it is a simple matter to decode and extract it.  I can decode
a search string from well over half the visits, and only miss a handful
of them that are too weirdly formatted.  The previous URL is known as
there Refering URL, hence the title of this section, and is available
to CGI programs through the "HTTP_REFERER" variable.

<p>
Once this was noticed, I decided it might be fun to try to attract
even more users.  Thus was the list of naughty words born.  It started
out with the words already used to get here, plus some obvious ones.
Some friends and I sat down one
evening and started perusing reference materials and searching out
and thinking up some good naughty words to put in the attract people.
Our new naughty words list grew to about 700 words this way.
At this time, all of the original list of words has been used to get
here, so that list is no longer on here.

<p>
This tactic proved to be overwhelmingly successful.  The day after
WebCrawler came to recheck my page, my visitor count rose from 50
a day to over 3000 per day.  Now I regularly get 20000 or more per day.
Most of these are from WebCrawler and InfoSeek.

<p>
Another thing I started doing is putting up various samples of search 
strings used for amusement.  I used to do this by hand with comments after
some of them.  Then my page started getting so much traffic that I 
just stuck them all in one after another.  Then EVEN THAT was too much, 
but a lot of them were repeats, so I had them all in with a number 
before them of the total lookups on that string.  But soon EVEN THAT
was too much.  At that time I switched to listing only strings looked
up 5 or more times.  The sorted and ranked list is now around 
4.8 megabytes 
just by itself, so NOW I only include the search strings used 
200
or more times.  
I will continue to adjust this higher in the future.

<p>
I also have a sorted list of the individual words with the number of
times they were used before each word.  Currently I list only words
used more than 50 times.  This will increase in the future as needed.

There's many things of interest in the list of words.  The most
interesting to me is the misspellings of the various forms of
masturbation, masturbate, and masturbating.  This is spelled correctly 
only about 6,200 times, and incorrectly over 10,000 times!
The most common misspellings are masterbation, masterbate, masterbating,
and masturbat.

There's other amusing misspellings if you look closely.

Also interesting to note who is popular on the web, such as
<a
href=http://www.indyramp.com/music/alyssa.html
>Alyssa Milano</a>
who is the most common person in the search strings.

<p>
In October 1995 I moved my page to the 
<a
href=http://pleasure.com/
>"pleasure.com"</a>
domain.  This is a domain I registered long ago and I figured that if the
<a
href=http://rs.internic.net/
>InterNIC</a>
was gonna start charging me $50 a year to keep the domain
name, I might as well start using it for more than just some moldy
email aliases.  And besides, it seemed all the more appropriate taking
into account the type of traffic this page was attracting.

<p>
All this was giving one of my friends a lot of ideas, so he got me to
let him put up some more appropriate material up under the
<a
href=http://pleasure.com/
>"pleasure.com"</a>
domain.  
So far he has put up an 
<a
href=http://pleasure.com/nude/
>Asian Babe of the Month</a>
similiar to the classic
<a
href=http://www.well.com/user/jef/
>Jef's Nude of the Month</a>
page, and has come up with a sponsor for it
as well.  Things are going quite well, although the amount of traffic
handled by it is stunning, and the server has literally destroyed two
hard disks and overrun both the available bandwidth and available CPU
power we were originally using.  The server has
since expanded to become a Pentium 120 server running on a dedicated T1
high-speed link the the Internet.
(He also came up with the alternate title for this section,
"Refer Madness" so you can tell that he not only has good
taste but can also be clever.  Too bad he has absolutely no
sense of direction.)

<p>
Because of the load of this page and the newer stuff on
<a
href=http://pleasure.com/
>"pleasure.com"</a>,
it was all too much for just one server and network link, so I moved
the page back to 
<a
href=http://www.tcp.com/
>"www.tcp.com"</a>
at the end of November 1995.
As of March 1996, I've come up with a domain name suited to this page's
contents, and have moved the page to
<a
href=http://drivel.com/
>"drivel.com"</a>.

<p>
In the grand tradition of copying what's popular, a guy in Hawaii who
came up with an
<!--a href=http://www.lava.net/~scooby/warn.html-->
Asian Babe of the Week
<!--/a-->
page.  He wrote to me on February 4, 1996 asking for a link from my home page.
With this kind of content I was only too happy to oblige.
With the tremendous load handled by the original
<a
href=http://pleasure.com/nude/
>Asian Babe of the Month</a>
page, I could only wonder how long his page could last until his
web server collapsed under the load.  Well, it didn't collapse, but
he did find out quite quickly that he is charged based on the amount
of traffic generated, and the measly 2500 visitors I sent his way in just
two days would end up costing him about $10, and he realized there was
no way to afford even this amount of traffic over a whole month.  He
is lucky he wasn't up to the 25,000 visitors per day which certain pages
attract.  Anyways, this is just yet more proof that naughty subjects
are immensely popular on the 'net.

<p>
Having all these naughty words also probably means I'll wind up on 
banned lists of the various filtering services.  I've already recieved
a note from a content reviewer at one such service saying that he found
my page amusing anyways.  It's nonetheless a fun and interesting diversion
to try on the web.  It's the second most successful prank I've done, 
the first most successful being the starting of alt.sex.pictures which has
since become alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*.

<p>
If you are coming here for HOT SEX LINKS, please see my 

<br>
<br>
CENTER
FONT6
BLINK
<a
href="http://drivel.com/jlick/bookmarks.pfhtml#adult"
>Adult Bookmarks (CLICK HERE)</a>
_BLINK
_FONT
_CENTER

<p>
and you
might find what you're looking for.

(Apologies for using the blink feature.  Normally I'm opposed to it, but
you'd be amazed how many people miss that link and flame me because they
can't find any sex stuff.)

<p>
The following lists are complete for users #679 through #2431055.

<p>
Here are all the search strings used at least 200 times, along with the 
number of times they were used (These are NOT links.  Please read the
above section.):

<p>
FONT2
#include "search-strings.txt"
_FONT

<p>
Here are all the individual words used at least 50 times in the search
strings with the number of times they were used (These are NOT links.
Please read the above section.):

<p>
FONT2
#include "search-words.txt"
_FONT


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