How Google saved my life

When not honing my bass-playing skills and trying to think of words that rhyme with ‘Charlene’ I like to spend my time minutely examining server logs and visitor statistics. Oh what fun.

Now these posts about “ooh look at what kooky searches I attract” are in my opinion somewhat overdone in the blogs about the place and I was reluctant to add another but two things struck me as I looked over the list of Google searches that hit this blog…

The first was that there were many queries about lyrics to various songs: Girl I'm Gonna Make You Sweat by Inner Circle comes up fairly often, Gimme Some Kind Of Sign by Peter Andre turns up too. By far the most popular query we get about song lyrics is for Max Merritt's Slippin' Away and for those happy people we have plenty to say on that topic. However the thing that struck me was that there were absolutely no search queries at all for the lyrics to any Squid Ink song. To lovers of the Squid Oeuvre I can say that a number of songs from our set began as posts to this blog that were later put to music. The lack of support for them from the Googling masses seems a little bewildering.

The other thing that I noticed from the log: among the more delightful queries (“Is spoon bending immoral” which in my mind is pure genius — “Helicopter acrobatics” my lord, you'd have to be searching pretty bloody hard to find that on this blog) was one for “squid ink's general objective” and that's a telling question. What is Squid Ink's general objective?

Is it to hang with the dudes and eat pizza? Is it to express ourselves artistically, exploring the idea of soap opera weddings as metaphors for modern society? Is it to enjoy playing some soul-tearing hot rock? Is it to win the adulation of millions? I had assumed that Squid Ink's general objective is world peace, Wyld Stallyns-style.