Web Experiment Part 1

To see if, and how permanently, a nonsense term can be placed on the web


On the 6th of September, I placed some code in the footer of every page of a "popular" website I own. The code was <img src="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=yblagulous+baby+names" width=1 height=1>

Of course, that URL is not the URL of an image. It would appear as a broken image, if users could see it. However, the width and height being 1 means the image would be only 1 pixel in size. It would basically be invisible to users of my webpage.

So why put it there? Every visit would cause the browser to attempt to load the image, effectively doing a yahoo search for "Yblagulous Baby Names". Now yblagulous is a nonsense word. Google reported, on the 6th of September :


Your search - yblagulous - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:



Now, yahoo tracks queries to their search engine, and summarises the results every month. The most popular searches involving 'baby names' "last month" (I suppose they mean August) included :
817104baby name
80801baby name meaning
45329top 100 baby name
39723baby girl name
34628baby boy name
30968popular baby name
21356unique baby name
18938unusual baby name
14974top baby name for 2005
11347indian baby name
etcetc
etcetc
etcetc
871russian baby name
84750,001 baby best name
839unique creative baby name
828latin baby name
813irish baby girl name
807hindu baby boy name
787italian baby boy name
783cute baby name
750spanish baby girl name

My "busy" site gets about 200 visitors every day. I left the code on the site for about 2 weeks.

After that, it was time for part 2 of this experiment.