What Google Says

In an interesting Navel Gazing and Social experiment Rick MacPherson of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice & Sunsets came up with a meme finding a number of search terms (other than the blog title) that result in a #1 google ranking for the blog. Somewhat predictably MBSLS came up # 1 on such searches as “coral reefs, conservation, queer” and "moray, rick". Somehow it also came up as the number one place to turn for “zelnio, conservation, blog, coral, drunk”.

I know Kevin and I long ago evolved into more or less responsible drinkers, but this is devastating news. Even though he is a friend, that's some important territory we need to win back from Rick. Kevin, we gotta do more drunk blogging about inverts and conservation! ;-)

Ok, while the scallop beer and lobster vodka chill, I'll respond to Rick's meme tag. It's a great excuse to procrastinate doing mindless GIS exercises.

First search is the obvious one:

1. "zelnio heupel" or is that "heupel zelnio" #1 either way (yes, with google sometimes word order does matter)


2. "chaetognath phylogeny" beat out some heavy hitters like the Tree of Life, Springerlink, and Oxford Journals.


3. "barnacle evolution" scored another top spot with Kevins awesome tribute to Alan J. Southward and summary of a great paper on Barnacle Evolution


4. "whale lice conservation" gets a nod as number one for the Quixotic mission to get Right Whale Lice listed as an endangered species


5. the "Nobel Jelly" surprised me with a number 1 spot as well

But then things get a bit weird:

6. "sea squirt porn" a search phrase that also consistently shows up in our logs...weird! There must be a lot of lonely sea squirts out there tapping into the lab computers, or desperate tunicate researchers, or.. well I really don't want to know if it's not the one of the first two.


7. "ostracod penis" got a top result, but not "ostracode penis" which only got a #2 result.


8. "squirt en masse" was a number one result that I really don't even think I want to know about


9. "sperm races" Beg pardon?! What? Oh, but that reminds me I need to set up the video to record those urchins, last time it was a photo finish

Looking through our logs some time ago I noticed "porn" was one of the top words that led people from Google to us so on a whim...I added "porn" to the end of a number of species we talk about and found out TO95% owns:
"whale lice porn" and "snail porn" with top ten results for "chaetognath porn", "mollusc porn", "cephalopod porn" and "arthropod porn". Interestingly Pharyngula beat us out on all of those except "arthropod porn" where Blackwell Synergy stomped our telsons.

So to be a meme it has to be self replicating...so if they would like to participate, I'm asking The Brine Queen, Bobbie and Jerry, Jason and Peter to gaze into their navels through Google and see what floats to the top.