1/13/2011

Creepy webstats

Sometimes, real life throws you something that just about makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not long ago, my Sitemeter account did just that. It tells me generally how someone reached my site--if it was through a search engine, it gives me the search terms that were used. The search terms used were: pepper smith abducted.

Yup. Creepy. Of course, having been web-cognizant for a while, I knew already that there were a number of other Pepper Smiths out there, and since I knew I hadn't been abducted, I figured it was one of the others. I followed the link to run the search myself, but nothing popped up to explain why that search term had been used.

A while after that, I got a Google alert with a link to a post by Jose Mandojana that explained that odd Google search. Jose is a photographer whose work appears in magazines, and he was blogging about a photo he'd done of a Pepper Smith in California, who had been abducted as a 4-year-old and is now an adult in her 40s. Very good shot of an attractive woman in front of a stormy seascape. Her story, and the photo, are in this month's Glamour Magazine. His post about it is titled "Kidnapped".

On edit: There's a pdf of the Glamour magazine article here.

3 comments:

Snuffygump said...

The things you would never know without the Internet

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad you settled that. It was a little unsettling to hear as a reader, mush less for you!

Pepper Smith said...

It was very unsettling in those first few moments, before I started thinking it must have been one of the other Pepper Smiths. Especially as a mystery writer, it was very easy for me to imagine something nefarious was afoot.