Trivia: the milk bottle mystery

Written By: - Date published: 6:30 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 63 comments
Categories: admin, interweb, The Standard - Tags:

Enough of all of this politics. Lets look at something that is more mysterious than the hole that John Key is digging for his political future. Why in the hell is “milk bottle” one of the most frequent search terms for this site?

Looking at the search queries that have resulted in a click through to The Standard over the last year (2009-02-11 to Today), I found that our largest searches were

  • the standard
  • the standard nz
  • www.thestandard.org.nz
  • milk bottle
  • standard
  • blog.labour.org.nz
  • funny
  • the maldives
  • thestandard.org.nz
  • the standard blog

Obviously most of this is from people who don’t use bookmarks, but use google to look us up. There seem to be innumerable ways to do that query – at least 30 in the top 50.

But what are people looking at “milk bottle” and “the maldives” for. There are thousands of queries for those two terms, and hundreds more for variants like “maldives”, “bottle of milk”, “milk” and “bottle milk”. For that matter there were other odd terms – like variant of “phosphate”. There were some expected terms as well. For instance people looking up our unfavorite munter who is currently having fun with the long drawn out court system.

So I did a search on google for “milk bottle”. We weren’t even in the running even with a NZ biased search. However when I did a search for images with the same search, we were the third milk bottle in the rank. It was from a post on Fonterra early last year.

Most of the other unlikely search terms appear to have been from the same source. The Maldives appear to have dropped off in the middle of last year when better (ie more clicked) images were loaded.

But it just goes to show that you’ll get more people looking for a pretty picture than the most reasoned of text….

63 comments on “Trivia: the milk bottle mystery ”

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  1. kiwiteen123 1
    11 February 2010 at 6:42 pm

    Who would want a photo of a milk bottle anyway?

  2. Jenny 2
    11 February 2010 at 6:55 pm

    The ghost of Rod Donald must be haunting The Standard.

    The last political campaign of Rod Donald was to save New Zealand’s last milk bottle delivery and deposit return system.

    He may be trying to tell us something.

    Did his campaign to defend returnable milk bottles, threaten the interests of the disposable manufacturers, and the waste removal and land fill industries?

    Do we need an exorcism?

  3. Lew 3
    11 February 2010 at 6:56 pm

    We have a similar thing at KP with the term “pink”. My post which features the image is on page 4 of the google search — behind several other versions of the very same image, and a lot more NSFW images.

    Our top search term since for ever, 16% of our hits. Go figure.

    L

  4. IrishBill 4
    11 February 2010 at 7:14 pm

    To be fair it is a very nice picture of a milk bottle. Almost Platonic in its form.

  5. bobo 5
    11 February 2010 at 7:17 pm

    STANDARD HOMOGENISED PASTEURISED MILK ?

  6. Pat 6
    11 February 2010 at 7:17 pm

    Perhpas some NCEA homework question? e.g. What was the volume of a standard milk bottle.

    Clutching at milk bottle straws.

    • Macro 6.1
      11 February 2010 at 7:37 pm

      Initially it was a pint – with metrics it became 600ml.
      But I remember when it was delivered by horse and cart and a billy…..
      Bring back the milk bottle I say

      Anti spam “reduces” hmmm that reminds me must put out the recycling..

    • Steve 6.2
      11 February 2010 at 7:38 pm

      Pat,
      The one delivered or the one we had at school, compulsory 1/2 pint?
      I remember lots of yellow fountains, strap and clean up your mess.
      Man the Socialists had power then.

      • Macro 6.2.1
        11 February 2010 at 7:48 pm

        “I remember lots of yellow fountains, strap and clean up your mess.”
        I don’t ever remember that. But then the milk stands were not in the sun like I believe a lot in the north were warm milk – yuck! I still enjoy a cool glass.

        • Pat 6.2.1.1
          11 February 2010 at 8:19 pm

          My great-grandfather drove the horse-drawn milk cart in Te Kopuru in the early 1900’s. During the influenza outbreak he delivered milk in the evening and collected bodies in the morning.

          • Macro 6.2.1.1.1
            11 February 2010 at 8:43 pm

            That would have helped!
            The pure cream milk – un-pasturised un-homoginised etc was definitely yummy – but not so not so good for public health!
            I have been reading the “Hungry City” – how cities have developed to feed themselves. London had cows in the city right up until Sainsbury’s introduced “railway milk” in the 1830’s – Country milk – cleaner and fresh – brought in by rail that very day. And that was the start of Carbon foot prints and Food Miles and our GHG began to esculate from that point on.

  7. QoT 7
    11 February 2010 at 7:33 pm

    What, no randomly-misspelled bizarre porn searches? Must be something about feminist blogs in particular that attract those!

    Captcha: “abuse”

  8. Danyl Mclauchlan 8
    11 February 2010 at 7:57 pm

    I’m the number one image result for ‘Ayn Rand’, ‘Gandalf’ and a bunch of other random things. It drives a huge amount of traffic to the site but people usually only stay for a few seconds.

    Cactus Kate and Whaleoil used to post pictures of celebrities or tag their posts with celebrity names (presumably) to attract google search hits and inflate their visitor stats – I’m not sure if they still do this.

  9. the sprout 9
    11 February 2010 at 9:01 pm

    who’d have thunk a milk bottle was such a hot topic eh? 🙂
    politics and polls…