Google's "Go-Faster-To" Perfume Blogs: Play The Predictive Search Results Game!

Things have been a bit hectic here lately with preparations for a series of back-to-back, multi-modal(!) trips to half a dozen countries (ie the usual bonkers fare : - ) ). This week I also learnt that the electrical signals in my heart are taking a cheeky shortcut which needs further investigation, while my blood is showing signs of intolerance to alcohol entirely disproportionate to my intake! This corpuscular phenomenon needs me to knock back (as in reduce, not swig) my nightly tippling for a while and see if that makes a difference. And then as any Facebook followers may have clocked, Mr Bonkers and I argued live on my wall about which of us needlessly put a Tupperware of mixed nuts in the fridge. Looking back, I am just grateful I didn't have to cook a full turkey dinner as well.

Although I haven't had time to do much blogging recently, I did want to fit in a quick post before I go off on Sunday, and decided to take an aspect of what could loosely be called "social media rankings" as my theme, not least because - as will become apparent - it is the sort of piece that quite literally writes itself... ; - )

In a previous post I puzzled over my involuntary classification in Wikio's Beauty Blog league table. Another possible indicator of a blogger's cyberspace status relates to predictive search results, ie how quickly Google anticipates the particular phrase for which you are searching, in this case a blog title.

According to an article in The Daily Mail, Google discovered that the average search request takes nine seconds to type, then on average users spend a further 15 seconds deciding which result to pick.

Here Google sings the praises of its 'Instant' facility, launched in 2010: "'Instant' takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions - yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful."

Well, I would have predicted that it is predictive, if it is predicting predictions, but no matter...

This new technology allegedly saves the user between two and five seconds, collectively equating to eleven hours of user time every second!

As for my own blog, I have noticed lately that when you type in "Bonkers about" - on my computer at least - "perfume" is the second suggestion after "babies", quickly followed by "bingo" and "buttons", ie the name is slowly climbing to the top of the predictive tree, though babies will be very tough to topple.

However, if you only type in "bonkers" you get "bonkers beds", "bonkers lyrics" and "bonkers Swindon" in that order - which is odd, as I used to live in Swindon! If on the other hand you go as far as "bonkers about p", you get "perfume" first (yay!) and "parties" second. Now I suspect that my blog is higher up the rankings on my own computer than it would be on someone else's, so if anyone fancies inputting any of these bonkers combinations and seeing how much lower I am ranked on their system, I would be curious to know if my theory is correct.

But having one's blog title readily suggested by the searchbots is only half the story, for it all depends how unusual your name is in the first place. The more common the terminology in the title, the longer it will take Google to come up with it, while blogs like "Cafleurebon", "Persolaise", "Olfactarama" and " Olfactorias" (before you even get to the "travels" bit) are pretty much googlewhacks. Now it doesn't mean that those unusual names were chosen by the blog owners for that specific reason, though in the case of "Cafleurebon" I'd put money on it, as they are very SEO-savvy.



And then just the other day Tarleisio changed the name of her blog from "Scentless Sensibilities" to the more esoteric title of "The Alembicated Genie": while the "The" doesn't get us much further than a clutch of British newspapers ("The Sun", "The Guardian"), "Alembicated" is a direct hit!

So for a laugh I played around with a handful well-known perfume blog names and present the more amusing results below. Note that this list is by no means exhaustive, plus there may be a UK or European bias, so if anyone comes up with other entertaining alternatives in their corner of the Interweb, do let us know!


Bloody Frida (keyword "bloody")

Bloody Mary
Bloody Sunday
Bloody disgusting
Bloody Mary recipe

A cocktail of violence...!

Redolent of Spices (keyword "redolent")

Redolent definition
Redolent synonym
Redolent in a sentence

People are clearly struggling with the meaning of the word "redolent"...

Undina's Looking Glass (keyword "Undina")

Undina
Undinal
Undina yacht for sale
Undina for sale

More a yacht than not, it would seem.

Scents of Self (keyword "scents")

Scentsy
Scentsy
Scentsations
Scentsational

Bad pun central!

Candy Perfume Boy (keyword "candy")

Candy
Candy bar
Candystand
Candy bar girls

Confectionery, billiards and a TV show about a famous lesbian bar in Soho - something for everyone there, I sense!

Now Smell This (keyword "now")

Now
Now 79
Now magazine
Now that's what I call music

Now that's what I call a perfume blog!

Katie Puckik Smells (keyword "Katie")

Katie Price
Katie Price Twitter
Katie Waissel
Katie Melua

Pipped by big jugs and vocal chords!

Beauty On The Outside (keyword "beauty o", because the first result with added "o" was so great)

Beauty of annihilation
Beauty outlet
Beauty of Bath

And finally, I am pleased to say that in the case of its own predictive search service, Google doesn't deliberately skew the results in its favour. I put "Instant" in and got:

Instant display
Instant payday loans
Instant loans
Instant messaging

For yes, in the grand scheme of things - and particularly in these recessionary times - "instant loans" are much more important than saving yourself a couple of seconds...


Photo of babies from pixdaus.com, photo of bingo from tutor2u.net, photo of face made of buttons from lisakokin.com, photo of Bloody Mary from like-a-boss.org, photo of Undina yacht from britishclassicyachtclub.org, photo of the Candy Bar from flickr, photo of Katie Price from theprivateplatecompany.com

New Wikio Blog Ranking: Because Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Searchbot

Some readers may have spotted the newest addition to this site, a red badge from Wikio, the information portal, listing me as No 44 in their Beauty Blog rankings. I decided to display it not because 44 is a particularly impressive ranking - but rather because it is any ranking at all in a category with which I perceive myself as having a very tenuous affinity. The only post I can remember writing about cosmetics, Mouldy Old Kohl And Broken Bits Of Blusher, didn't exactly present my make up bag in an optimum light...

Now I think about it some more, I also wrote a couple of posts about an Avon face cream, and one about a Chanel nail polish - or about wanting to have it rather than the actual item itself. And along the way there has definitely been something on a Mitchum anti-perspirant and Label M's hair souffle, but that is about the extent of it as far as I can recall, out of nearly 200 posts now. And the latter two aren't really about beauty so much as avoiding the twin personal grooming crimes of unsanitariness and untitivated hair. So I am quietly fascinated by this whole web crawling business, with its armies of industrious software spiders, scurrying in all directions to forage for billions of cyber titbits.

Now it should be remembered that these searchbots are by definition a bit robotic: just for fun I googled "Wikio badge", and got a site called "Behind the Badge". Ah, I thought, a whole blog devoted to decoding the algorithm behind Wikio categories and rankings. But no...it was a blog that offers its readers "General rambling from the perspective of your friendly neighborhood former policeman".

So, bearing in mind the vagaries of web crawling, I couldn't resist taking a peek at my listing under Beauty on Wikio and found that I do in fact cover the following topics:

LIFESTYLE FASHION LINGERIE AGENT PROVOCATEUR FRAGRANCES WOMEN'S FRAGRANCES FASHION DESIGNERS

Why, this is is a revelation to me! I didn't know that I wrote about "Lifestyle" particularly. Well, maybe my own lifestyle, which - when I am not burning rubber on foreign freeways - mostly consists of sitting about in my pyjamas a lot. Could that in fact be what they mean by the third heading, "lingerie"? Thinking of the fleecy M & S pair I am sporting at the moment, that might be a bit of a stretch. And I don't believe I wrote about actual underwear lately. Hmm, might there have been a teeny reference to a satin teddy in a post about Natori? Or was it Stella Nude? Just checked...it was Natori, silk, and the simile in question was not necessarily my own - says she, quickly trying to shimmy off all suggestion of responsibility for louche lingerie allusions.

Hold on, though - these headings are in fact hyperlinks to the selection of posts containing material on each topic. So the lingerie one is based on my recent post about L'Air de Rien (okay, I did utter the words "carnal filth", but no lingerie per se was mentioned. More a scenario where lingerie could have been worn, at least initially).

Then the next post was this one about my nightly ritual of wearing Agent Provocateur to bed. Which does involve pyjamas at least! But again, not lingerie in the sense I understand it. And my regular application of Agent Provocateur was prompted by a desire to quantify the number of wearings in a 4ml mini rather than an attempt to create a boudoir ambience.

And finally, the third post mentioned concerned an Estee Lauder mini of Pure White Linen that went bad during the heatwave last June. I used the word "Impure" in the title, but didn't mean to connote any kind of lewdness or conduct involving scanty clothing. What is slightly concerning is that I wrote that post ages ago, yet it is one of the most popular posts from the past 30 days, suggesting a lot of people might have read it, unless they were shocked by the title and clicked away sharpish!

Hmm, I may have spoken too soon...I just clicked on LIFESTYLE to see what exactly Wikio was classifying there, and on Page 2 up popped titles including the phrases "embrace your inner nymph(o)," "sultry sweetness" and "the dirty half dozen". No wonder they think lingerie is mixed up in all this! On the basis of those saucy spoils from the searchbots, my back catalogue sounds like pure, unadulterated smut - or do I mean impure, adulterated smut?

But at least I am living up to my categories. If you think a Lingerie-Wearing Lifestyle one belongs in Beauty in the first place, that is. Well, the nicer stuff might do. Not those grey and forgiving big pants (known euphemistically as "full briefs") which you hang on to just in case you ever need to wear a very poor quality of pants one day for some reason (though the particular circumstances in which this need might arise are never made clear). So yes, there is a chance that visitors may find Bonkers too lingerie-focused, too racy altogether, which is a possibility I had never entertained.

I bet some of you are wondering why I didn't register my blog under the Perfume section instead of Beauty, because there clearly is one - I know a few highly ranked bloggers with badges to that effect. Well, I actually registered Bonkers under "General" blogs, as I couldn't spot a category for Perfume in the drop down menu at the time I joined - or not on the UK Wikio site, or whichever one it was. Maybe I should have clicked on "No Specialisation" and then typed "Perfume" into the comments box below, the way you do with those "Unlisted Brand" and "2Grrls" options in Makeupalley. And where on earth did they get "2Grrls" from, anyway? But as things stand on Wikio, I don't believe you can "port" your blog across to another category.

Now in General blogs I am currently 3396! Out of how many, goodness knows. That level of ranking is considerably less to write home about than on the Beauty side of things, but at least I can confidently describe myself as "general". I don't think you need to have a broad spread of topics to qualify, but if you do, I obviously have a foot in several thematic camps already. My own belief is that General is entirely made up of lost speciality blogs like me. So I probably fit right in.

So the only question left is which of the remaining categories Bonkers about Perfume might fetch up in next. I think I could make a case for Cars motoring (sic), Knitting, and Wine and beer, but Parenting seems like a long shot, ditto Law, Economy, and Religion and Belief. I don't see a category for Humour, come to think of it, so if the bots get to read this and are not amused, there is always a chance they might boot me and my Beauty badge off the site altogether...


Photo of make up from inetgiant.co.uk, photo of police badge from Wikimedia Commons, photo of pyjamas from letsbuyit.co.uk, photo of searchbot from seoyourblog.com