Anyone familiar with the “Magic 8-ball“? In like, third grade, your friend would bring one to school, and you’d marvel at its ability to randomly generate spectacularly vague “answers” to the questions you asked it, like “Does Cheryl like me?” or “Does Bobby smell like boogers?”

Well, this is a little off-base, but Sitemeter which tracks website visits offers a nifty little feature which allows you to see from whence your visitors come, how they got to your website, etc. Embedded within the body of the “referring URL” is often, I’ve noticed, a query. Apparently, people think that google.com, ask.com, yahoo.com, are the modern day Magic 8-balls, capable of answering questions.

Questions such as “Will WiFi be everywhere?” or “how did labor unions build the middle class?” or my personal favorite, “IS DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS STILL ON STRIKE?” (all caps in original)

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This seems very, very strange to me – is it normal? Do most people actually type a question into the “search” field on the search engine? Doesn’t the addition of superfluous words like “how did,” “why are…,” etc., cause alot of false positives in the search results?

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And although it’s not a question, I found this one humorous: we hate unions we want them out now