I took a look at the stats for this blog for 2012, and in particular at the search keywords that bring people here. It made for some interesting reading, and fair amount of googling on my part to double-check the results. Can people really have found their way here by googling for “brown slimy mushrooms”? Yes, indeed, my photo is the #6 result.

Some searches are seasonal. In November I got a number of visits from people interested in chestnut animals (my photo of Ingrid and Eric making chestnut critters is on page 1 in Google image search) and both November and December brought people looking for pictures of felt advent calendars.

My photos rank highly for several product searches, where I would have expected more commercial sites to dominate. But their images probably get names consisting of long random strings of numbers and letters, rather than descriptive, search engine friendly ones like mine. I am, apparently, an authoritative source for images of “ikea shopping trolley”, “bugaboo the chameleon” and “stokke xplory” and “aerial straps varekai”.

The people who come here after searching for “space between cherry tree saplings” will be sorely disappointed when they find out that I do not plant cherry tree seedlings, but pull them out by the hundreds.

Several of my photos rank highly in image searches for unexciting search terms such as “standing on toes building a tower”, “jumping on stones” and “sharpening pencil for children”. Most interestingly, I have made Adrian the poster child for “unsafe kitchen with a child in”, “unsafe kitchen pictures”, “unsafe pictures children”, “unsafe kitchen” and a number of other variations on that theme.

I imagine some teacher somewhere searching for a decent summer-y photo of kids doing a wholesome summer-y activity such as jumping on stones. Or maybe a social worker preparing teaching material (for new parents, perhaps) about how to baby-proof your kitchen, and then using my photo of Adrian as a scary example of how not to do it. I wonder how many newsletters or crappy PowerPoint presentations there are out there, featuring Ingrid jumping on stones or Adrian playing with wooden kitchen utensils.