I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how writing a blog provides an excellent, hands-on education about some of the basics in understanding and appreciating how search works. It is something I’ve started paying more attention to as I track how people stumble across Diggings, especially the search phrases that direct people to this blog. In a very sad, strange twist to that phenomena, I received tons of traffic to my blog today from people searching on ‘Craigslist + Death’. This post was actually the 2nd search result on Google out of 1,960,000 results. What people were looking for was the horrific story that occurred in Minneapolis this past weekend of a woman, responding to a nanny ad on Craigslist, who was found dead in the trunk of her car shortly thereafter. It’s an appalling story and one that perfectly captures people’s fear about the dangers that lurk online and how sick people can take advantage of the power of the web. At any rate, it’s a horrendous way to see one’s blog traffic spike.