Turkey Hunt

The search engines are directing people this page of my travel blog which Julieanne wrote after sampling some of the wonderful cuisine on offer in Turkey. My guess is that people are using the qualifier “edible” to distinguish the country from the food. Unfortunately for those discerning searchers, Julieanne decided to call her post about the country and its food “Edible Turkey”.

Why Me?

I’ll be brutally honest: my site gets very little traffic. It’s a semi-stagnant personal site in the backwaters of the blogosphere where only my close friends bother to paddle (hi guys!). However, at the time of writing, the page in question appears 8th on Google when searching for that query.

The only explanation I can think of is that “edible turkey” is something like a Googlewhack - a combination of two terms for which there is only a single page indexed by Google. According to Google, searching for “turkey” alone gives about 204 million hits whereas searching for “edible” alone gives about 16 million. Pages containing both number around 1 million.

The only remaining question is why are there so many people searching for turkeys of the edible variety. As I don’t live in the US, it took me a little while to realise that the sudden interest was due to Thanksgiving. To test this theory I thought I’d get myself some more stats.

Turkey Trends

One of the cool search toys that you can find over at Google Labs is their trend visualisation tools. Whack in a search term and you can see how the number of people search for that term has changed over time. If I had thought to use this when I was originally puzzled about the traffic to my site I would have had the mystery solved in seconds.

Observe! The trend for “turkey”:

Even though there is no disambiguation between Turkey-the-country and turkey-the-food in the graph the huge spikes every year around November make it pretty obvious that most searchers want the food. (The labels on the graph are news events Google has correlated with spikes which you can see by clicking on the image).

The smaller spike just before Christmas is most likely also for turkey-the-food. Even when the graph is restricted to searchs from Australia - the land of the 35°C festive season - you can see a growing interest in the bird towards the end of the year:

The large spike shown above around the middle of 2006 was very likely due to the bomb blasts in Turkey towards the end of August. Interestingly, that event barely rates a mention in the first, world-wide graph. A graph of for the US only shows the same lack of interest:

My guess is that the US search results make up the bulk of the world-wide results (it’s hard to tell because those trend graphs have no absolute numbers). Since the interest in turkey-the-food is so large in November it swamps any interest there may have been in the blasts. I’d be surprised if there was a genuine lack of American interest in the Turkey blasts given their sensitivity to terrorism of late.

Recipes for Disaster

I’m a computer scientist by training so I’ve got a rough idea how Google and other search engines rank pages. Enough to know that by writing including many turkey-food related keywords such as “basting”, “carving”, “stuffing”, “cooking”, etc I’m actually probably increasing this site’s search relevance when it comes to that particular cuisine. That in turn may mean that people looking for Thanksgiving recipes may unwittingly find my inane musings on search statistics.

Come to think of it, including the word “turkey” in this post’s title probably doesn’t help the situation much either.

So, for all of you who are genuinely looking for turkey recipes I would like to make amends, especially considering that you’ve read all the way to the end.

I think you may be looking for this.