Top 10 web searches of 2007

One of the most underrated parts of having a blog is being able to check and see how people are arriving at your site. Some days, if you've written something particularly engaging (or, more likely, offensive), a site or multiple sites will say something nice about you and throw you a link. On other days the traffic is simply made up of the 16 people (growth) who are so ridiculously bored at work that, in a final feeble attempt to be informed or entertained, they take two seconds and type in your URL and hit enter.

But when you've had a blog that's been around for at least a few months, the one constant when it comes to traffic is web searches. Whether it's Google or Yahoo or Sam's Totally Awesome Search Engine (up and comer), people find ways to come to your site...and every now and then they're hilarious.

I don't have the stats in front of me, but I can say with an extremely strong degree of certainty that the three most frequent searches that led people to this site over the past 12 months were "Fire Kragthorpe," "Kragthorpe sucks," and "Billy Gillispie DUI." Proving once again that nothing can stir up a fan base like a successful, uncontroversial head coach.

So there are the searches you see just about every day, but on better days there are the searches so bizarre that you feel a certain sense of pride when you realize that the person who felt the need to look for this on the internet ended up at your site. I can't imagine the glorious phrases I missed over the past 12 months, but when I did happen to catch a search that was particularly outrageous, I took the time to make a note of it.

Since I love end of the year lists (I've already looked at like 12 "the year in pictures"), I've decided to share with you my ten favorite searches that led people to Card Chronicle in 2007.

Brace yourselves, some of this is unfit for the eyes of the innocent...or annoyingly sensitive.  

10. "look in the mirror when when figuring things out"

This one is pretty harmless, but it makes the list strictly because I'm still baffled that my site came up in this search. I can't recall ever figuring anything out while staring into a mirror, and I'm fairly confident I've never advocated doing anything remotely similar. I can only hope that this person stumbled onto a Stuart Smalley website shortly after exiting CC.

9. "bout a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness"

This is obviously a quote from Caddyshack, but I'm not sure why the searcher in question felt the need to type or paste in such a large chunk of it. You'd think a string of four or five consecutive words in quotation marks would produce the desired result, but whatever.

8. "Bobby Buchanan is a shitty cornerback"

Poor Bobby just couldn't catch a break during his four years at Louisville, and now here he is being kicked around again. I'm not saying that it was Mike Cassity performing this search, but Bobby B was moved to safety a couple of days after this.

7. "my lower left leg is itchy"

If you're hoping to get legitimate medical answers after typing in a search like this, you deserve to wind up at a middle of-the-road, team-specific college sports blog.

6. "Can you chew on marijuana?"

Thank you Willie Williams.

5. "bobby petrino cocksucker"

I think it's the lack of any separation between the subject and the adjective here that makes me laugh every time I see it. If you toss an "is a" in there, then I don't think this makes the cut.

4. "hot gay video"

Probably should have known that throwing the words "gay" and "video" into the same headline would produce these types of results, but if the situation comes up again at least I'll know for sure. For the record the headline came about because I was posting a video of Willie Gay's big hit in the Steelers' first preseason game. The story was actually linked on several gay porn spam sites, which evokes the old saying "there's no such thing as bad exposure...except for a sports web site being exposed on a gay porn site."

3. "what to do when your kids disappoint you"

Sarcastic barbs followed by fits of laughter and no dinner.

2. "Brian Brohms penis"

You know, the friendly comments and appreciative emails are all nice, but this is what really makes everything worth it. If this blog has a prouder moment in 2008 then we'll all know it was a hell of a year. Thank you my inquisitive friend, thank you.

1. "fuck jim nantz"

I think more than anything it's the mental image of someone watching The Masters or the NCAA Tournament and just not being able to take anymore that makes this my No. 1. Anybody else bearing the brunt of the F bomb might not have been able to snatch the top spot, but Nantz, well Nantz belongs here.