Thursday, January 10, 2008

Reader Beware

I am surprised to learn from my visit tracking software that a number of folks come upon my blog via a google search. I can see the search terms they used and the part of my blog that the search steered them too. For the most part, this seems all fine and good. I wrote a post about making choices, someone in Tonga did a search on "I make a choice" or something similar and wound up spending a bit of time reading my essay on making choices. However, other times, I can see that searches may have led folks to misleading and distressing results. A reader in Egypt, and another in Switzerland, put in search terms into Google Image along the lines of "arthroscopic knee surgery two weeks". I imagine they hoped to see a fully recovered healthy knee, which would usually be the case two weeks after arthroscopic surgery. Instead they saw a grisly picture I posted of my leg bruised from hip to ankle by internal bleeding that ocurred when my own arthroscopic surgery did not go well.

So reader beware! The world wide web is large enough to contain typical and relevant items, but also atypical items. This is to say nothing of all the outright false material that is available. Perhaps one of the readers was encouraged to know that their arthroscopic surgery was not the only one that had resulted in a egregious misfire. Perhaps the other reader was frightened away from potential arthroscopic surgery by a picture of a rare mishap. Reader beware!

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