And now, my tips for hair regrowth

Search usability -- or, more precisely, search usefulness -- still has such a long way to go.

I see the evidence almost every day in this little site's referrer logs. Most of my traffic comes from two sources: Google searches on things I've written about, or clicks in from the site's RSS feed when I post something new.

In the case of traffic inbound from searches, sometimes I just have to laugh at phrases for which the Small Initiatives site ranks high nowadays:

• "ways to look handsome and sexy": Much as I am happy to help gentlemen less attractive than myself (all three of you) achieve my level of hotness, I don't think my site is what this searcher intended. In Google, the query matches my post from last week describing a new mobile headlines format like so: "Is it handsome? No. Sexy? Nope. Does it work as Winer describes? Yes. Is it therefore elegant in its simplicity, practicality and usability? I think so."
• "mean porn": Eww. I thought maybe blog comment spammers had punched this one through my thick layer of antispam measures, but no. I once posted a throwaway item with the headline, "You mean porn isn't a license to print money?"
• "myspace designs": This search, or some form of it, has become the No. 1 search phrase that leads people to my site. I know what you're looking for, kids: templates and style sheets to hack up your generic, totally unusable MySpace page into a blinking, flashing, spinning, totally unusable MySpace page with a ghosted background image of Keith Urban (or mean porn, if you're into that). But what you're finding on my site instead is a post titled "MySpace design's a page view farm" -- meaning, of course, that it's totally unusable. Abandon all hope.

Want to know what's funny? Now that I've written about these search strings, I've probably just amplified the problem. Google will come a'crawling and these terms will seem even more common and relevant on this site. So for those of you who search and find this post, welcome! And sorry it isn't what you wanted. Although I find daily bathing and clean living really help with the "handsome and sexy" part.