[ Spoiler ]

I started drafting this post when I has been waiting anxiously for [Spoiler] this blog post [/Spoiler]. In order to set the stage for this I need to let the narrative unfold – the unbelievable story of Search Term Poetry.

[ Unnecessary Egocentric Intro Comment ]

Actually I once figured I would unlock the universe’s fundamental secrets as a scientist or invent something ground-breaking as an engineer. Later I hoped for leaving my mark by contributing to internet standards. None of that happened.

But finally my time has come: I have started a viral, grassroot movement – bridging the chasm between art, geekiness and procrastinating by means of The Net.

[ The Dawn of Search Term Poetry (still egocentric) ]

I proclaim that The Subversive El(k)ement founded Search Term Poetry on Dec. 12, 2012 (12-12-12!). Historians of art: If you are aware of any earlier creations of search term poems or spam poems, let me know!

[ The Professionalization of Search Term Poetry. Enter: The Philosopher ]

But I have been trumped on the spot by a real philosopher’s search term poem. How could a tech / geek blog and related search terms compete with something like “existential frustration is not pathological”?

[ Voice from the future – hyperlink health policy 2019 ]

Many of the links in this post are broken. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to archive.org-ifying them. The elkemental ones should be intact, at least we tried to fix them all…

[ The (Intermittent) Marginalization of Search Term Poetry. Exit: Subversive Elkement ]

My second search term poetry experiment  probably got lost in all those end-of-year-best-wishes-posts. Which is a pity as I believe my searchers have become less geeky and more philosophical, searching e.g. for “theory about stupid questions”.  But I did not use the proper social media channel yet.

[ The Birth of Spam Poetry. Enter: The Linguist ]

But then some the movement suddenly inflated, sparkled by a harmless post by Alex Brown on alleged (but interesting) spam. This in turn triggered my dabbling in a new genre – spam poetry which triggered … a whole lot of activities by Alex:

• Search term poetry by Alex – avant-garde type dreamscapes – as in these movies I usually do not understand. But I was really intrigued by “Ice hockey: without ice.”

[ The Globalization of Spam Poetry. ]

• German spam poetry: Spam worauf Geothe stolz sein könnte – that I understand in terms of words, but probably not in terms of meaning (probably like Faust, part II)
• French spam poetry – that I do not understand at all let alone some words I (falsely) believe to recognize based on some Latin buried deep inside me.

[ The Viralization of Search Term Poetry and Spam Poetry ]

• Alex created hashtags for #searchtermpoems and #spampoems – this is the way to get a movement going in Web 2.0 era!

[ The Social Marginalization of Search Term Poets and Spam Poets ]

BTW these activities have not exactly increased our numbers of followers on Twitter. But revolutionaries are often misunderstood and laughed at when the revolution is still in its infancy.

And now I have the pleasure to show off pieces or search term art that might really convince art critics.

[ A Digression – There is no digressification, is it? ]

And I need to digress to set the stage: This is the kind of stuff that would be accepted by publishers fooled by fake artists. Similar to one of my favorite examples of fake art: A well-known German comedian pretends to be an aspiring Russian artist presenting his songs to a German audience of ‘experts in art’ – who start a hilarious over-serious intellectual discussion on this type of art.

[ The Zen-ification of Search Term Poetry. Enter: The Founder of The BLAHS ]

So this means: Mark Sackler, please submit your Search Term Haikus to some well-respected publisher of poetry! (Without the humor part, but maybe they would not notice anyway)

[ The Scientification of Search Term Poetry ]

I believe (linguists and philosophers, correct me) that the key to optimization of search term poems is to find real sentences or at least verbs that let you build sentences. E.g. in one of my poems I connected “the first heat pump” with “it was built”. The fun is always twofold: 1) in the fact that somebody really submits a clause like “it was built” to a search engine and 2) the connected with a totally unrelated noun. And it this case the whole sentence sounds a bit like Yoda a – a goodie for geeks

It can also work with nouns, such as in “rodent electric chair”, then specified in more detail by “a sustainable product”.

The very best search terms are full (meaningful) sentences whose creator already did that for your: Connecting words that had used in your blog in a completely different way. My current favorite – not yet art-ified – is a search term by visitors of one of my German blogs:

“2012 das jahr in dem die erde gefriert”
(2012 the year the earth froze)

submitted by a Google Image searcher. The target article was about how to utilize the freezing of a large vessel of water in a heat pump system.

Mark’s haikus score particularly high on this word connection scale(*), as demonstrated e.g. by:

“Many worlds are around us
So why don’t you leave.”

(*) To be investigated in future PhD projects in linguistics.

OMG, now I have dissected how art works and/or explained puns – a sacrilege maybe. On the other hand I have provided the blogger community with some advice on building great search term poems. Now I want to hear from you! Publish your  #searchtermpoems and #spampoems – and let us know on Twitter!

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If this article was not top search engine optimization re search term poetry I do not know what is…