The Googlers

Do you ever go to your blog stats and look around? Come on, you totally do, and being that you do, you’ve probably seen the list of “search keywords” that have led folks to visit your blog. (On Blogger: Stats – Traffic Sources – Search Keywords)

These are things people typed into Google that somehow led them to your blog. I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of weird, random things in this list, and one item that takes the randomness cake. Here’s my Top 10 Traffic Sources according to Blogger in reverse order:

10. 1989 bowman ken griffey jr – 5 hits

Somehow the Griffey rookie from one of the worst sets of cards ever made cracked the top 10. Apparently people want to know about it. I can’t imagine why. Maybe they’re trying to find out if there is an effective way to store these with the rest of their cards.

NOPE, by the way.

9. bowman tiffany baseball card - 6 hits

1989 Bowman #220 Rookie Tiffany

This one makes sense. Even I was a little thrown off by all the Tiffany versions out there. Turns out the Bowman is the rarest of the Tiffany rookies, rarer even than the coveted ’89 Topps Traded Tiffany. Hopefully this search leads folks to my 2012 post where I talk about the Tiffany Bowman rookie at length. If it doesn’t, here you go.

8. griffey cal purple – 7 hits

I think this is a shoe thing. The amount I know about Nike Griffey shoes could fit on a Topps Micro card, so these seven poor Googlers were really wasting their time.

7. the 80s 90s and 2000s with – 8 hits

This chunk of words was taken right from the middle of some poor, unsuspecting sentence; and frankly I have no clue how it led someone to me. What about this group of words says “Griffey baseball cards?”

6. ken griffey jr – 12 hits

Perfect.

5. griffeys 2014 – 12 hits

Yeah, okay.

4. the junior junkie – 13 hits

Aw, you guys…. *blush*

3. how many griffey rookies in 1989 upper deck box – 15 hits

Now this is a really good question. Here ya go:

Low # boxes: 15 cards x 36 packs = 540 cards per box/700 possible cards = ~0.77 Griffeys per box
High # boxes: 15 cards - 2 high # cards = 12 low # cards per pack x 36 packs = 432 low # cards per box/700 possible cards = ~0.62 Griffeys per box

There is a little less than one Griffey rookie per box on average. Two is not unheard of but zero is far more likely than that. You will pull one more often than not, but it is more likely from a low # box.

But there’s a problem. These boxes weren’t sealed, so a lot of sellers will open packs from multiple fresh boxes until they pull a Griffey from each, then combine the remaining packs to create multiple new “fresh” boxes to sell. It’s not impossible to pull a Griffey from one of these compromised boxes, but the odds are significantly lower. It’s cheaper to just spend 20 bucks on an aftermarket Griffey rookie and call it a day. Or buy a complete set - it'll run you about the same price (probably a little less even) and the odds are 1:1. Them's good odds, too.

2. thejuniorjunkie.blogspot.com – 28 hits

Who Googles full web addresses? My Mom, that’s who. Just plug it into the address bar, people. Oh, and thanks for visiting.

Ladies and gentlemen, the most heavily-searched term that led someone to The Junior Junkie:

1. is junior s first – 68 hits

So I’ve looked at this string of words and…um, one letter, for some months now and it remains a complete bloody mystery to me. Obviously it’s an interrogative being that it starts with “is.” This leads us to think there must be a yes or no answer to said query.

So, is Junior “s” first? No. Junior is J first, followed by U, N, I, O, and finally R in that order. I cannot think of a context in which the answer to this question would be “yes.”

I’ll admit that my curiosity got the best of me recently and I went ahead and Googled this string of letters exactly. My goal was not just an explanation of its meaning, but also how it could possibly be connected to the blog. After scrolling through 40 pages of results, I found no mention of The Junior Junkie or baseball cards of any kind. I did find one reference to Ken Griffey, Jr. on page 30, his baseball-reference.com page. That was it.

What could it possibly mean? And how does it outpace every other search by such a huge margin? And how many pages did someone have to click through to get to my blog...68 TIMES? So many questions.

I realized while making this post that this is going to make my blog show up even higher in the search results for these very terms. So, to all those “is junior s first?” people, the answer is yes. Junior is indeed s first. Don’t ask me how I know – just go with it. Now that that's out of the away, have you heard the good news about Griffey?