The internet is a great source of information and with modern search methods it is easy to find practically anything you want. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) uses key terms that a user might put in to find a relevant website. An individual word is no longer enough. For example, you cannot put ‘England Premier League’ if you want last Saturday’s results because that would take you to the official page. You must put something along the lines of ‘English Premier League Results’. Some websites though have had some strange search times for people directed to their sites. Here are some of the best examples.

1. David Cameron Side Profile

One of the most famous bizarre search terms has targeted British Prime Minister David Cameron. Anybody innocently looking for a side-view photograph of the PM has found themselves bizarrely confronted with a completely unrelated image. It is of a medical procedure designed to demonstrate how to check the male prostate. It looks like a typical sketch in a school textbook or medical instruction manual, perhaps aimed at medical students giving their first examination. Quite why this is confused with David Cameron is not clear.

2. The Shire to Mordor

Those boys and girls at Google must have a lot of time on their hands because one of the most popular redirects when a surfer puts the above search term into Google redirects to Google Maps. Beneath the boxes where you’d put the two reference points was a note that said ‘One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor’. Sadly, the issue has now been corrected and there are a number of places all over the world with ‘shire’ and ‘Mordor’ in their names which means you will get a redirect close to wherever you might be in the world.

3. Miserable Failure

Another link that no longer redirects to an amusing result (sadly ‘ it now redirects to the Google Bomb page of Wikipedia thanks to SEO improvements), the above search term used to take the user straight to the whitehouse.gov website and specifically to the biography page of former President George W. Bush. This came about as a result of something called ‘Google Bombing’, a practice that the search engine are wise to and removed as a search method.

4. Which Pizza Restaurant?

In a cheeky bit of advertising, people in the UK looking for the link to order pizzas from the Dominos chain are given a second option to their preferred delivery parlour ‘ Pizza Hut. Some advertising guru at the company decided to put Dominos in the Google Adwords link to grab some of their rival’s customers. However, Dominos Pizza is still the top option on the list of preferred advertisers. Technically this is against Google’s rules but either nobody has noticed or Dominos do not care.

5. Zombie Proof Trucks

Sustainable Life Blog is one of the web’s best known green living community websites and as it is audience participation and independent, the site owners have had some of the strangest search terms redirect to their website. One of them is the above search term. The site does not discuss zombies and as it is about sustainable living, generally does not advocate using trucks, let along how to combine the two for when the world is over-run with the un-dead.

6. How Much is my Eyeball Worth?

eHow is one of the web’s biggest advice sites with so many directions on how to do anything and everything that it has become the must use web accessory for the searcher who needs to know things he didn’t know he needed to know. As a popular site, it has come up against some of the weirdest and most unusual search terms such as the one above. It is a strange state of affairs if the financial crisis has become so bad that people are genuinely intrigued to know how much they might sell their eyes for on the black market.

7. What does the Bible Say about Bigfoot?

Another user wanted to know the answer to this question and was redirected to eHow again. Sadly, there is no page answering this question and perhaps the person who searched for this was able to find out from his priest the answer to this critical question. Not even science has ever answered whether there really is a Bigfoot and maybe never will either.

8. Crocosaurus Against the Jews

Theshiznit.co.uk is a UK based website that has interesting and amusing articles about films. It covers everything from the latest blockbusters, cult classics and B movies. So it is no surprise that it would have an article on a film called Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus. What is surprising is that a number of people thought that the film would either have an anti-Semite approach or that the titular Crocosaurus would find itself in a fight against Jews.

9. That Movie About’¦

Not quite a bizarre search term but a clever method for film site IMDB to encourage you onto their database and to help you identify a film you remember watching but no longer know the title. There are many examples across the web of searchers putting ‘That Movie About’¦ (wine for example)’ and the results come straight up with IMDB search results with multiple listings. This is possibly the way to go for future SEO developments.

10. Facebook ‘ naturally I want Twitter!

Competition between social networking sites is incredibly fierce so it is no surprise that Facebook would appear so high in a search for the microblogging site Twitter. At one point it was on the first page but Twitter has managed to take most of the top spots. It is, however, still very high in the Google rankings.

Conclusion

The internet and search terms are never going to be perfect and occasionally a rogue search term is going to send people to a completely inappropriate site. The problem is that the more people click on these inappropriate sites because they are bizarre, the search engine will recognise them as legitimate destinations for those search terms. So creating lists such as this only exacerbates the problem as people seek to investigate such rogue terms for their own amusement!