Friday, May 30, 2008

I Don't Get It

I use Sitemeter.com. It tells me who comes here, when, and sometimes, why.

As to the why, I am the number one site in the cyber universe for the “Federal Judge Song” which I’ve posted about before.

Now, people around the world are doing Google searches for “rather than” and rather than. Guess who they get?

We aren't talking a few people, tens, scores. More than a hundred over the last months. What are they looking for? If I knew, I’d do a post that, like the Federal Judge Song, got them where they want to be; but, the why just escapes me.

If any of you have a clue, please, let me know. If we can’t figure this out, I’m left with contacting Google and insisting that it alter its algorithm to exclude me from the quixotic search of these poor people. What, oh what, do they seek?

4 comments:

fermicat said...

My most common search term is "pimp camry" or one of a dozen variations on that theme. Silly searchers. Don't they know Camrys can't be pimped?

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I searched for "rather than" on Google in order to find the grammatically correct usage of this expression. As in my phrase:

"Lack of such a posterior (secondary or tertiary) compliance betrays a risk of a harm rather than constituting a harm."

This phrase refers to the three paradigms in ethics, where judgements of acts (as good or bad) can be: outcome-based, principle-based or personality-based, as described in "Consequentialism", a Wikipedia article.

Is "constituting" correct? Or should it be "constitute", or "constitutes"? I decided that it should be changed to "constitutes".

Then I clicked on your blog article because you complained in it about people who, like me, search for that phrase. I felt both responsible and curious why. As it turns out, it was because you didn't see any sense in it.

Well, in my case, the sense of our encounter is that the title of your blog well represents one of the possible uses of this expression.

You might still remain bitter about such treatment, though, because it is instrumental and superficial to the intent behind your blogging contribution. After all, it's not about English grammar!

Wishing you fruitful blogging
Matthew from London, EU

molly gras said...

WOW! Dave, way to make a request and get a response ... you truly are amazing!!

Maybe now you'll consider launching into some grammatical pedagogy in order to help out these well-meaning stray searchers ...

:)

Dave said...

Hey Matthew, thanks for explaining. As you can see, I fixed the duplication.