Help, I Can't Cope with My Stats Program!

It's not the mechanics that are giving me trouble, or interpreting the data. The problem is the search strings. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher, or maybe because I've spent so much of my career writing consumer information (or maybe I'm just obsessive-compulsive), but I have a deep need to be able to RESPOND to searches.

Today, for instance, someone visited this blog based on the search string "Rick Springfield's daughter".

Rick Springfield doesn't have a daughter; he has two sons. See, it's just such a quick, easy little answer. I want to drop a quick email to the person searching for information on Rick Springfield's daughter and let her know. But I don't know who she was, and she already didn't find what she was looking for on my blog, so she probably won't be back.

It's even worse on my Catholic blog. Over there, I get search strings that are questions, search strings like, "Can a Catholic marry a non-Catholic?"

Well, see, I HAVE the answer to that, but it's not on my blog. And it's a shade more important, I think, than whether or not Rick Springfield has a daughter. But there's nothing I can do about it now.

I'm actually in the process of putting together a Squidoo lens on Catholic marriage purely in response to the number of questions about the subject that are landing people to my Catholic blog. And I'm glad I was inspired to do that, but...um...see...it's not quite good enough for me. Because, after all, the PERSON WHO ASKED THE QUESTION might not see it.

Okay, it's much clearer now. It's definitely the obsessive-compulsive thing.

The Great Yahoo Conspiracy?

I recently used the (free) Google information bar to find out how recently Google had spidered a friend's website. Good news--they'd visited just a few days earlier, less than a week after the previous visit.

I cut and pasted the date and time of the visit into an email and sent it to my friend--and that's when the intrigue began. You see, my friend uses sbcglobal as her ISP, and SBC, as you may know, is Yahoo! (or owns Yahoo!, or is owned by Yahoo! or some such--I can't keep it all straight)

SBC sent me an autogenerated email telling me that my email was undeliverable for "policy reasons".

I puzzled over this for a moment, experienced a moment of gratitude for gmail (however creepy it might be that ads relating to the subject of my email pop up up in the margins) and considered sending my friend an invite to get a free gmail account. Then I re-sent the email to another of my friend's accounts.

She replied from her SBC account. That got through fine, trailing my cut and paste along with it, but when I tried to respond, I got another bounce message...policy reasons again. No explanation as to what policy I might have violated, of course. And I can't rule out the possibility that there's some code under that Google information that innocently set off some kind of screening. But I also can't rule out the possiblity that the policy I violated was one against consorting with the competition, and that idea leaves me decidedly uneasy.