Rory has a great piece up in the latest Juice he calls Some Meditations on those “Amusing Searches”.
He noticed that many of
the funny searches we find in our logs are trying to tell us something about information seeking
behavior, and that we can actually learn from them when we are done
giggling. He discusses a typology of the “amusing search,” with
lessons and questions arising from each. He breaks them down like so:
“The Embarrassing Information Need,” “All Over the Map,” “Children and the Otherwise Naive and Uneducated,” and “People Enjoy Surfing Around”
“There are
doubtless a lot of different directions that a reflection on server logs
could take. For example, someone else might want to explore the mystery
presented by these traces of people’s information seeking and what it
means that webmasters get these glimpses of their lives. “
Not just for geeks
Read this even if you aren’t a geek. It poses some thought-provoking questions about the nature of user searches and what libraries could or should do better.