What is "blac" and why are so many people searching for images of it?

August 10, 2007 11:36 AM

Why are so many people doing image searches for "blac" and ending up on my blog?

I used SiteMeter to track visitors to my blog, which includes referring pages and Google search terms that bring visitors to the site. For several months, about 75% of my traffic has been coming from Google Image Searches for "blac".

I have a post on my blog with an image from the movie Black Hawk Down named "blackhawkdown.jpg" on my blog, and, in addition to direct Google Image Searches for "blac," I often see in SiteMeter that visitors' referring page is the result of an image search that brings up blackhawkdown.jpg. I assume they got there via an image search for "blac" as well.

The visitors come from all over the world, including the U.S., but many of them seem to be from Germany and the Netherlands.

posted by annabellee to computers & internet (5 comments total)

People can't spell.
posted by smackfu at 11:39 AM on August 10, 2007

Could you link to the blog post or picture? I looked through the first few pages of results for "blac" but couldn't find it. It makes sense that non-English speakers would misspell their search terms more often, but without knowing what's in the picture it's hard to say what these Germans and Scandinavians are looking for.

(After searching for "blackhawkdown.jpg") Sheila?
posted by contraption at 11:51 AM on August 10, 2007

Google puts a fair amount of weight on the filename of images when doing matching for image searches. Since filenames don't usually have spaces, and often don't have other obvious word delimeters like dashes or underscores, google has to guess where the word boundaries are.

The can and surely do use a dictionary with word frequencies as a basis for that guessing. That dictionary is by necessity and definition based on an analysis of a corpus of text. In Google's case, that corpus seems to be a large part of the world wide web. If you do a word search for blac on the Google web index it will tell you that it has over 2M matching pages (vs about 10M for feline, as a reference point), and it doesn't even suggest "Black" as an alternate spelling.

Therefore, it makes the reasonable assumption that "blac" occurring in the midst of filename or URL is an actual search term and indexes it as such when it comes across a filename like blackhawkdown.jpg.
posted by Good Brain at 12:18 PM on August 10, 2007

Smackfu is right, by the way. I get a surprising number of google hits from people looking for "pitchers+beautiful+women". (Don't ask me why Google sends them to me.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:44 PM on August 10, 2007

Because "pitchers" is a synonym for "jugs" of course.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 4:26 PM on August 11, 2007