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Date Posted: 07:58:35 09/18/02 Wed
Author: tint
Subject: The Case of the Red Cardinal

Submitted for your collective skills of cognition and reasoning in the hope that a conundrum of momentous proportions might shed its sinister shroud I present to you an enigma. An enigma so complex in its onion skin layers of shifting paradigms and so elusive in its modus operandi that the answer may well yield more questions that spawn more questions until finally, the very mysteries of life are laid bare before the fabric of human existence.

That's right, you could go down in history as the unraveler of the secrets of the universe. Oh and a nifty $250 credit at some online merchants that I am.. er.. acquainted with to boot for the riddle solver. So without further superfluous introduction...

The RIDDLE

Background info:

Every week a report is put out called WordTracker which gives web marketers and other interested parties a list of the top 200 keyword searches on the internet in the previous week as well as the top 300 over a 3 month span. A cursory review of these lists will yield few surprises. Plenty of sex, porn, lolitas, bestiality (actually beastiality gets more searches than the correct spelling...guess grad students are not the major demographic there). Hotels is usually number one. mis-entries of popular sites are high up the list such as "ww.google.com", "yahoocom", etc. Then there are your generic stalwarts such as weather, horoscopes, maps, health, goats, casinos, web hosting, domain registration, chat, poems, song lyrics, quotes, etc. Okay goats was a lie but it deserves better.

No major surprises there, right? The list stays pretty consistent and predictable with the short term searches reflecting current events such as "9/11" and "twin towers" being a major search leading up to last week's anniversary of the tragedy, and the long term tracking reflecting more permanent trends which are for the most part status quo.

Get on with it, I know. However there is one term that stands out like the proverbial sore thumb. It is a term that is always in the top 20 search terms on both the short term list and the long term. It's sits entrenched in the number 11-14 ranking like it sprouted roots, week after week, faithful as the famous geyser. It outranks weather. It outranks maps. It outranks casinos, gambling, games, computers, shopping, health, beauty, free, and, well, every other word combination in the world save for a dozen of its 400 lb gorilla peers.

Red cardinal.

Red cardinal. I know. Okay, take a minute and collect yourself. No, its not a mistake. Its search volume was validated independently by me through Overture Inc and Google.com. It actually does get an ungodly amount of searches across the board on all major search engines.

The riddle, the mystery, the confounding conflagaration of boggling barometric banality lies in one simple question. What are they looking for, these searchers of feathered fanatacism? What? I've mentioned this to a dozen people, nobody has a clue why. For such a popular search term there are virtually no advertisers selling anything or bidding on this term.

The only thing I could find in my search for the holy ornithological crimson grail were red cardinal knick knacks. And the St Louis Cardinals. So I bought the domain name red-cardinal.us, threw up a quick rinky-dink webpage, got some red cardinal inventory like plates and sculptures, put an ad on Google and awaited the business bonanza that wasn't. If you search under google.com under red cardinal you will join the half million people per day who see my sole little paid ad off to the right for "Red cardinal treasures" that links to my one page toss-together site, http://www.red-cardinal.us

Less than 0.1% of the searchers click on that ad and of those who do virtually nothing is purchased. By comparison, my maca ads yield an average of 8% clickthroughs per impression. So, they are NOT looking for red cardinal knick knacks. They arent looking for St Louis Cardinal gear (no sports team of any kind is on the top searches list, and i doubt st louis is going to beat the yankees or d-backs in sports fan searches). There is also a red cardinal flower I discovered in my searching but that has also been disproven as a source for the red cardinal craze.

I can find no movie coming out called red cardinal. No band, no song, no underground cult, no pop culture obsession of any kind to shed a single ray of light.

Let me summarize the facts:

1) The term "Red cardinal" is consistently among the top 15 search terms of the over 110 million terms searched each day on the internet.

2) Its popularity has not diminished at all in three months.

3) The searchers are primarily US and exclusively English speakers. Rojo cardinal's not on the map.

4) They dont want red cardinal collectibles, figurines, plates, wind chimes, or other crap like that. They don't want ST Louis cards stuff. They look right past that stuff.

5) There is no apparent reason whatsoever for its search popularity, its staying power, and it doesnt appear that anybody else knows what they are looking for either or they would capitalize on it.

That's it. I'm not expecting much but on the off chance this makes anyone else curious enough to look into it at all is better than nothing. With all those people searching, it seems like someone would have heard something. As a last resort I will change my google ad to "RED CARDINAL - Only site that has what you are looking for" and then I'll throw up a 'what the hell are you looking for?' poll on the page or something, heh.

if you come up with anything or have questions hit me up on icq or email me at dsmith@macasource.com

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