'from accountant to animal savior'-blog analytics and the power of Google

At the moment I have three very interesting books on my desk that are subject to proper reviews:












And while I was in the process of reading the books, struggling with refer spam and the new blogger dynamic view template, I came across my collection of strange search terms that lead readers to my blog throughout the past weeks and months. On the one hand, they are interesting examples of how well Google's search algorithms work, because they are all more or less related to the contents of my blog. 'More or less' is the keyword here. Because some of them are quite a bit far off of my intended message or arguments and they made me wonder how well the search engine works for others-or outside the small development blogosphere in the real world of e-commerce.

There are a few sub-categories, though. First, there are search terms I would describe as 'essentialist' when it comes to the 'development industry', e.g.:

international development consultants daily rates

microsoft dumbing down development

ngo's inflated salaries

what pays more business or ngo

and one of my all-time favourites that best describes what the development fuss is all about:

from accountant to animal savior 

or simply

do i want to work in international development???

what is the nature of locality in a deterritorialized world?
 
The second, even bigger category is related to doing a PhD, studying development and development research and starts off with four search terms that pretty much sum it all up:

phd as the easy option

most postgraduate programmes are rubbish

do u need a phd to work in international humanitarian aid

anthropology doctorate a waste of time

But there is also a range of more detailed queries. For example:

teach yourself development studies
 
how many case studies do i need for a phd

who is gonna pay me anthropology degree
 
do you need a phd to be an anthropologist?
But all jokes aside, even if the search queries are somewhat related to my blog's contents it is also indication of how wide the 'error margin' is and that any statistic about who visits your blog oftentimes needs to be taken with one or two grains of salt...but I would love to hear your stories about search engines and how visitors ended up on your blog-maybe there should be a competition about the funniest or most obscure/ridiculous search query?! 

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