We’d heard that NASA were struggling for funding, but we didn’t really expect them to land on our site to try and find it. At least we assume that’s what was happening when someone from the US arrived on Spacehive by searching “How can I fund my space project?”. (NASA, if you’re reading, we’d love to fund a new shuttle. Get in touch!)
It’s #traffictuesday, and as we get a lot of weird and wonderful searches that lead people through the morass of the internet to the bright, gleaming plains of Spacehive, I thought we should share some of the best. Most of them are very relevant, and very worthy, local people who haven’t yet heard of Spacehive or Crowdfunding, trying to find out about their local community centre or lawn tennis association. There are a lot of people out there looking for things to do with ‘disused space london’, which is always encouraging. We don’t yet have a database of that, but it’s interesting to know that people are looking for it.
By far the most popular search that gets people to us is some variant on the Spacehive name, which is fair enough. There’s a lot of clumsy fingnresr (sorry, fingers!) out there, and it’s easily done. Especially if your full stop key doesn’t work: lots of wwwspacehiveecom and the like. But occasionally, you get a gem, down there in the long tail of search engine results. Just what was the person who was searching for “Papier Mache Queens” at 3am looking for? You can just imagine the angst of the pet owner anxiously searching for “Gym for obese pets london”, a wheezing chubby chihuahua at their feet. Someone even searched for my name and ‘estate agent’; I might have the stomach and bad hair for it, but I’m definitely not an estate agent. Although a similar search for “Chris Campbell livery” may well have been looking for this chap, a very distant ancestor. Maybe I should crowdfund a statue of him?
My personal favourites are “companies that make rubber rings” and “funky cricket bats”. I don’t want to speculate on the first, but you can imagine Kevin Pietersen there at his desk, keyed up about his England return, wanting to make an impression. I hope he liked Cage.
But best of all: “large dead fish.” I do worry, sometimes.