My MacBook Pro is still in Texas. But apparently they spent all day today “repairing it.” This sounds slightly better than the situation a friend is in, whose MacBook Pro went in for roughly the same problem, but is now on indefinite pause as he waits for a “part on order.” I can’t help but wonder what is so different about mine and his that we require different solutions. The only thing different about mine, that I can tell, is I complained about a whole lot more. Maybe they’re still reading through the list …

In my last post, I shared some rather silly statistics about Google and how many hits one receives for certain silly queries. I noticed over the past day or so that Google is sort of clogging my “referrals” list. I don’t know if this is because more people are searching on terms that I happen to match, or if my PageRank just went up. I think the PageRank for the blog itself might have just gone from 5 to 6. That’s cool. And I haven’t looked at the “search referrals” in my logs for a long time, but the recent influx caused me to do some examining.

It’s fascinating to pore over the list of search terms that people type in to ultimately reach your blog or site. I don’t think most users know that the exact phrase they enter gets transmitted in this way to the target site that is ultimately clicked-through to. It’s worth considering. If you’re interviewing for a job with Bob Jones, you might not want to type “How do I eff with Bob Jones in my interview tomorrow?” into Google the night before the interview, and then click-through to his personal blog. Just a little word to the wise.

Sometimes I worry that my obsession with the MacBook Pro noise flaws is unnatural. You know, maybe I just got fixated on it and now I’m this cranky geek who can’t ignore it. Kind of like after my dad pointed out the Sony Trinitron lines (defects!) in our computer monitor when I was a kid. Damn it! I never did much like Trinitrons after that. But it’s kind of reassuring (and saddening, at the same time) to browse through my search referrals and see just how frequent people are desperately typing MacBook Pro related queries into search engines. As I looked through my logs, I tried to think of how I could best convey the magnitude of queries that exist, and how clearly frustrated and at a loss the public is to find an answer to these problems. There’s no way I could do it, so I decided the best thing to do would be to just show you exactly what it looks like.

Here are my last 500 search referrals. Now, I know a lot of them have absolutely nothing to do with MacBook Pro or noises associated with them. But a lot of them do. people are spending their quality time searching on this. This is not what people like to Google. They’d rather look up themselves, their friends, porn, or world of warcraft tips. Instead they’re looking up MacBook Pro noises, hissing, humming, buzzing, etc. And keep in mind that these results span a relatively short period of time (less than 48 hours), and only consist of clicks that actually made it through to my little site. Multiply this over every day (and probably different users every day), and you start to understand how disappointing, how personally infuriating these defects are to those of us who expect the highest quality product from Apple.

My favorite quote? “Stop the cow macbook pro.” I couldn’t agree more.