The Fair Maid of Ireland

The "Fair Maid of Ireland" is a synonym for the Will-o'-the-Wisp which, on 15th April, I started getting an enormous amount of referers for. I have an IRC channel on Freenode that has two refererbots in it, using Kragen Sitaker's watchlogs.py code, one for each server that inamidst.com is load balanced across. I've often noticed that there will be phases of referers where people keep coming to my site for similar search terms, and I've wondered why that's the case. Since this particular Fair Maid thing was so strong, I figured I might be able to find out what's behind it.

So I searched about a bit and found that it'd been used as a clue in the New York Times crossword, but way back in March. So what was causing the new wave of searches? Since the referers were coming in thick and fast, I modified my Wisp page that they were landing on to enquire of the visitors why they were searching for that particular phrase. At first it didn't seem like it was working, but after tweaking the wording carefully and making sure that I gave two mechanisms for responding, both email and an optionally anonymous feedback form, I got an almost overwhelming amount of responses.

Basically, that was the day that the New York Times crossword puzzle, #00304 by Bob Peoples, had been syndicated to local newspapers across the country and even up into Canada; the clue causing all the referers was the one to 41 down. I got 58 responses overall, 29 anonymous and 29 not. A staggering 50 used the feedback form, so I only got 8 regular emails, which just goes to show the effectiveness of the feedback form idiom (which I got from Jorn Barger).

Here's a summary of all of the responses that I got: Baltimore Sun (1); Calgary Herald (2); Clarion Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi (1); Contra Costa Times, San Francisco Bay Area (3); Corpus Christi Caller Times (1); Daily Herald, Snohomish County, Washington (1); Dallas Morning News (2); Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York (3); Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, Utah (2); Des Moines Register (1); East Valley Tribune, Phoenix, Arizona (1); Fort Worth Star Telegram (2); Herald Leader, Lexington, Kentucky (1); Minneapolis Star Tribune, "The Strib" (3); Montreal Gazette (1); "New York Times" (13); North County Times, California (1); Orange County Register, California (4); Oregonian, Portland, Oregon (4); Sacramento Bee (2); Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal (1); San Diego Union-Tribune (4); San Mateo County Times (1); St. Louis Post Dispatch (2); The Huntsville Times, Alabama (1); Times Record News, Wichita Falls, Texas (1).

I made sure to send thanks to all of those who sent non-anonymous feedback, and got a variety of quite interesting tidbits from people, thanks, and even some wondering how I knew they were doing a crossword. It was fun to see the distribution pattern, but mainly it's nice to know that these trends for search terms to occur in groups probably aren't random, though it would be nice to know what causes some of the less obvious ones. Incidentally, I had got a similar amount of referers (a few less, I think, overall) when the crossword had first appeared in the New York Times, but I didn't realise until now since I didn't have the referer bots running then.