If you’re looking for a can’t-miss business idea, I can assure you there’s money in the custom ping pong paddle industry.  Seriously.

The most common search term that lands people here continues to involve homemade paddles, with “China home made ping pong paddles” and “sweet paint jobs for a paddle” showing up this month.  Though, actually, that last one may be related to something else entirely that maybe we should ignore.

I’m not sure how to monetize that — maybe do-it-yourself kits, mall kiosks offering custom paint jobs — but there’s money there for sure.

For anyone who still doesn’t agree with my method for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, at least I include the peanut butter part.  Someone ended up at that post recently after Googling “Jelly on bread.”  Sounds delicious.

One of the cool things about the service I use to see this info is that it will (sometimes) tell you where your site ranked in the search results.  Even better is seeing how ridiculously patient some people are when browsing those results.

Take this recent example.  Someone in India searched “Gutters cleaning service,” which after 197 other results listed my post about the epidemic of gutter-cleaning peeps leaving flyers stuck in our front door.  For the record, we still aren’t interested.  If the Google page shows 10 results at a time, that means they browsed through nearly 20 pages of other options before reading my post.  And even then, it could in no way have had anything to do with what they were actually looking for.

Those are my favorite outcomes, when what I wrote has absolutely no bearing on what the person was trying to find out.  Someone once searched something like “what aisle silly bandz target” and ended up at a post describing these awesome marshmallows I found at Target and a completely unrelated anecdote that mentioned Silly Bandz.

Thanks to another search a few weeks ago, I now know that Googling “tweety tat” brings up one of my posts as the fifth result.  It has nothing to do with Tweety Bird or tattoos, of course.  Just me talking about my Twitter habits.

There was one search in the past month that did really make me curious about the searcher.  They said, “Why not live it up take the risk,” and landed on this post from 2007.  I was writing about the movie 10 mph, which tells the story of a team of people who were unsatisfied with their lives, quit their jobs and pursued a project of riding Segways across the country.

I wrote it the day after I quit a job that was sucking the life out of me and daily worsening a sense of personal disappointment.  Whether that somehow drew me to this movie, or if it just happened to come to me at a time it would really speak to me, it did help to put some things in perspective.

I hope in this one case the searcher found what they were looking for.

I’m glad to see that some people have also started making use of the buttons on the bottom of each post that allow you to easily share something you like.   If there’s one thing people love to do these days, it’s sharing links, and the buttons make it easy to email, post on Twitter and Facebook, or for the really cool kids, +1 it on Google.

As always, thanks for reading.