My new web hosting company  provides whizzy administration reports for uh, well, administering my website.

One report lists the "referring URL" on each page served.  What's a referring URL, you ask? Every request of a web server by a browser sends along the URL of the page the user was on when he clicked the link that resulted in a hit on your site.  For example, if  www.yahoo.com contained a link to www.charlieanderson.com/AboutMe.htm, and someone browsing Yahoo's home page clicked that link, the referring URL ("http://www.yahoo.com") is sent along by the browser as a little informational bonus to web server charlieanderson.com along with the name of the page it wants (AboutMe.htm).  The server writes this factoid to a log file, and then goes about the business of sending back the contents of file AboutMe.htm. 

Frankly, I didn't expect to find anything interesting in this report. But I was wrong.  For example, I discovered that a woman in Edmonton, Canada uses an jpeg hosted on my server as her avatar on an Alanis Morissette bulletin board.  Thousands of times a month my server is called upon to cough up this file--whenever someone views a topic page on which "RubberChicken" has commented.  I'm not complaining; in fact, I rather enjoy this net sharing.

Once in a while, someone will visit me from a link posted on another site.  My Demise of the $.01 Sign story apparently has fans out there.

Many of the referring URLs are from search engines.  What's cool is that referring URLs from a search site include the search words as part of the URL, so I can see, Big Brother-like, what people were looking for when they ended up on my site. Usually, the matched page was my Lost in America journal, simply because it contains the most unique words. 

Below I've listed some search text culled from referring URL reports.  It's a microcosm of what people are searching for on the web.  Lots of interest in sex ("topless donut shops"), lots of people unclear on searching ("I want to learn about picking wild edible mushrooms in northeast pa"), and lots of searches that defy categorization ("jello generator grill," "preserving food in deco bottles").  The events of September 11 generated a number of hits.

I hope the people that ended up on CharlieAnderson.com found the information they were looking for, but somehow I doubt it.  Few of the hits came from Google, the world's best web search engine.  Google is far too smart to send someone looking for "shark attack video clips" or "City of Calgary" to my little site.

You have questions about Jello generators?  Plastic zellinsky?  Homemade menstrual pads?  Nude camping in Louisiana?  Frankly, who doesn't.

And can somebody please tell me what the hell is going on in Kentucky?