SORRY FRIENDS, NO "SEXY AUNTY IN BATHROOM" HERE...

A few weeks back, in a fit of insecurity over my internet presence, I installed a counter on my blog. At the time I innocently thought it would simply tell me if anyone was reading what I was putting time into posting (I knew many of you were, but I was feeling insecure, ok?), but it actually told me so much more. The site I went through tracks all sorts of things that I never considered could be so easily ascertained. And now, I can never go back to the before-time, to the time of internet innocence.

In the 42 days since I installed the magical device, 269 unique visitors have been responsible for 630 page views on 485 separate visits (and perhaps more - you can see for yourself on the wee monitor if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page). On the site itself, I can look at this data broken into several different groups such as geolocation, page tracking, and referrers.

In the section on referrers, I can see whether people have come to CougDom via the blogs of friends, on their own, or whether they have arrived through a search. Here is a sampling of some of the ways people have been directed here via the mysteriously arbitrary hand of google:

angry kitty
dog farmer's boys
racist toothpaste
childrens bedroom furniture pictures
international tractors
others
sexy cougar ladies
sick cougar pics
lazy cougar
black lionhead rabbit
chengdu hookers
muffled voices
hi sailor wav

And there are so many more. Who knew that so many out there are determinedly searching for "puppy with mohawk" (2 hits), or "hello kitty face mask" (3 hits), and more importantly, who are the charming, naive souls googling "Chinese cougar holiday" or "cougars and pandas getting along", and why have I not befriended or married them already?

I adore the internet, really I do, but outside of the limited realm of my own interests, which are amply served by its circuits, I find it much too overwhelming to conceive of the enormity of the thing in its totality. Still, this tiny window on the interwebs has both startled and amused me. A few hundred people ain't much really, but the data hints at the incredibly volume of searches, prowls, and electronic ambulations that are taking place all the time and almost everywhere.

A full 70% of my visitors are from the U.S., which is understandable, but that means a whopping 30% are outside of it. In total, I've received visits from the residents of 28 different countries. Many of these make sense, since I know people in England, Taiwan, Germany and the Netherlands, but why on earth am I so seemingly popular in Australia (8 hits) or Malaysia (3 hits)? I used to be able to look at the national breakdowns by city, but this function hasn't been working lately, so I can't chide my friends in Bloomington, or wonder who I might possibly know in Atlanta who visits at least twice a week.

I can also figure out where some searches originate by looking at the language being used. This is how I have discovered that the Danish are oddly interested in "Case International tractors" (4 hits so far, all of which were, to their likely befuddlement, directed to my May post on Blammo) and the Germans, perhaps less surprisingly, interested in "female domination".

It really was rather naive of me to start up the blog based on my nickname (and that awe-inspiring video) and not think of how many people would accidentally arrive here when they were instead looking for that other kind of cougar ("cougar bars", "cougar dating", "sexy seattle cougar"), or even of the innocent cougar lovers overwhelmed by the new meaning of the word and just looking to find out about those fearsome beasts ("cougar cats only", "people fighting cougars"). I feel a little, well, strange, about strangers happening upon this site, but I also welcome interest in China and my tiny little life here. Then again, call me crazy, but I really don't think I want the person looking for "giant cock domination", "best sexy massage in beijing", or "sexy aunty in bathroom" to find my little internet hidey-hole. Although, based on the stats on average length of time spent by visitors, I'm guessing most of the perverts and random googlers that land here see a picture of a chick's face on a cougar body, and hightail it on out of here. Which is good, because THERE'S NOTHING HERE TO SEE.