Legal Research

TypePad has lots of nifty features, including tracking how searchers get to your blog posts.  By using the "Referring Address" feature, we can review the searches that led someone to click on one of our blog posts in a search result. Don't worry - we have no way of identifying who entered the search.  We just see which search engine was used, the text of the search query, and the results generated from the query.

We had a big spike in traffic yesterday, so I decided to review the search query archives to see why so many people visited us.  Turns out lots of people are Googling three grim words: "law firm layoffs."

I also came across some pretty amusing searches in our archives: 

1) "Justice Scalia bobblehead"  Yes, we do own several Supreme Court justice bobbleheads, and we blog about each new arrival!

2) "brain steroids" Hmmm....perhaps someone is starting to feel a little worried about finals?

3) "heartwarming news"  There's a hint of desperation in this one.  This searcher didn't even add any details like "heartwarming news about the economy," they just wanted to find any shred of heartwarming news out there.  Somehow I doubt that the ZiefBrief post they selected, which was about how Americans are reading more literature, really gave them the warm, fuzzy feeling that they were searching for.