Getting Googled

One of the odd things about having a weblog with referrer statistics is that you can see it when you get Googled. I mean, I can see it when people get to my weblog by accident, when they've Googled things like "open wound bleeding" or "execution by disemboweling" or "the ocean smells like" or "Arizona itinerary," or "love and sailboats" or "ivy league schools." Mostly, when people come to my blog from Google, it's a mistake.

But every so often, people enter a search query that lets me know they're looking for this blog, or for me. That's kind of thrilling and creepy at the same time -- I wonder who it is, and why they're looking for me?

This weekend I had a novel experience. I was having dinner alone at my favorite sushi bar on Saturday night, prior to meeting up with a couple of friends. A man sat down and commented on the work I was doing, and we got to talking. It was far more fun to talk with him than to do my work so we had what turned into a lively conversation, about law and sailboats and business and sushi and whatnot. My friend L joined us for a glass of wine, and we all left at about the same time but because of a conversation I got into just before walking out the door, I didn't have a chance to say a proper goodbye to my accidental dinner companion.

On Sunday morning I got a very nice email from him, confessing that he'd enjoyed talking with me and felt bad about not having said goodbye, so he'd Googled me. He found this blog and my email address there, said he really enjoyed reading it and talking to me, and offered himself as the solution to my I-need-a-date-before-May-3 post (which unbeknownst to y'all, I'd solved prior to getting the email).

The whole experience took me by surprise, although thinking about it now I'm not sure why it would have. I am choosing to publish little snippets about my personal life to an Internet audience, a mix of strangers and people I know. And the blog can be found pretty quickly with a Google query. And yet I still don't (or didn't) expect a person I have a casual conversation with to have access to what I write here -- it's sort of a level of intimacy beyond what tends to come up in a bar. So getting an email where someone I'd revealed only some information to had a lot more information than what we'd discussed was a surprise. Not an unwelcome one, I guess, although I did decline the kind offer of dinner. Just, I don't know, not how I'd been imagining my relationship with this blog audience, whoever you guys are. (And hello to you, H, the subject of this post, if you've remained a reader.) I guess I need to do some reimagining.