: the shocking truth about keywords :

Writing isn’t all drudgery. There are many moments of pure delight. Moments when you forget the stress and frustrations and enjoy a good belly laugh. Those moments are called image searches.

I can’t be the only one puzzled, and amused, by the vagaries of search engines. Who’s programming those things and what’s the logic? Seriously, it’s a quandary. Sometimes there’s a slight connection, albeit strained and misguided, but discernible if you think hard enough. For instance, I did a search for ‘nose’ and images of deer popped up. With antlers and such. I was stumped, then — *bink* — Rudolph, of course, of red-nose fame.

Just as often, the connection remains a mystery. This morning I did a search for ‘bliss’ and got the expected array of dopey grins, as well as a hair straightener image and a peacock. Okay, for whom is hair straightening a blissful activity? A shaky case might be made for peacock — it has the proud thing going for it — but it’s quite a stretch.

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Once in a while, the long while of donkey years, you hit pay dirt. Amid all the junk and all the dreck is a brilliant, shining image that’s nothing short of inspired. A search for ‘hide’ once delivered an image of a broom sweeping dirt under a rug. That one wayward suggestion was an honest-to-God launch pad of ideas. I love those moments. No, I’m grateful for those moments; they’re a reason to press on in this lunacy.

The best course to follow when image searching is to restrict your hunt to the tail end of projects. Do it dead last or whenever you need a jump-start. Otherwise you’ll be rerouted and sent wandering far, far afield. Distraction, thy name is image search. And I’ll bet thy middle name is thesaurus, isn’t it? Synonyms are so entertaining I forget what word I started with and why. See? I digress even now. Sorry.

So. Keywords? Pshaw! There’s no key, they can’t be unlocked. Accept it and move along.

copyright © 2016 the whirly girl