Keywords tell the story

Search engines have become the road map for the web. Being fairly lazy, I'll usually just enter a search term into the tool bar right in Firefox rather than try to remember what a specific company's domain is. I'm not alone. Turns out a decent amount of the traffic on my web site comes via search engines.

It's always interesting to look at the keywords folks used when they end up on securityincite.com. It gives me some decent insight into what people are looking for and also what is hot. Most of the traffic is looking for me, so they either search for Mike Rothman or Security Incite. That's fine and means my other means of building the "brand" are working.

But its the other ones that are interesting. If you take a look at the some of the most recent search traffic, there is lots of stuff you can learn. Of course, none of this is statistically relevant, but it's interesting fodder for speculation. Let's take a look:

Looks like some folks are interested in full disk-encryption (even though Microsoft's BitLocker is not going to make it into Vista) and also 802.1x supplicants. The ongoing UTM battle is interesting and IBM/ISS continues to captivate the world at large.

You get the grumpy customers who search on terms like: "Alterpoint sucks," and I'm not sure how they get to my site. You also get a gist from the M&A rumor mill. Even today someone searched for "rumor CyberTrust acquire." Again, this is less reliable than seeing writing on a bathroom wall, but it's interesting nonetheless.

For example, people were searching for "Secure Computing acquires CipherTrust" pretty consistently for 3 days before the deal was announced. So who knows, maybe there is some gold in there.

What is the funniest search term? That's pretty easy. About a week ago someone searched for "Jay Chaudhry fooled McNulty" which had me rolling on the floor. Of course, Jay is the CEO of CipherTrust and McNulty the CEO of Secure Computing. Go figure. Maybe they know something I don't.