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[death] The Autopsy — blogger Brooke Magnanti takes a close look … ‘The autopsy is an examination of the body as machine, a hardware hack on hopeless equipment. As with some bugs you may never find out what went wrong. There may be several ailments: a pancreatic cancer, say; a cirrhotic liver. The evidence of death is incontrivertible, but the cause is an eel slipping out of your hands.’

[Updated 11/2009: Searchers for Belle de Jour can find more about her here]

Brooke Magnanti on Autopsies

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2001 at 9:58 am and is filed under Life.

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8 Comments

Was this your first Belle De Jour link?

[posted by Stu at 12:46am on Nov 15 2009]

great detective work!

[posted by Dave at 9:49am on Nov 19 2009]

Clever. I was aware of googlewhacking but this is first smart use of it I’ve seen. Good work, sir.

[posted by tim at 10:25am on Nov 19 2009]

Nice one, well done. Good work.

[posted by Mike at 12:23pm on Nov 19 2009]

Even knowing, it took me a while to see how you did it.
So simple, so smart.
Impressive.

[posted by Graham at 4:29pm on Nov 19 2009]

Ok – so I see the two references, and I suppose you could have planted some tracking code to store the ip addresses of people visiting this page, but how do you get to knowing which visitors googled both terms? Do you just scan the logs to find any IP address that comes up more than once? Sorry – a bit thick at this end…

[posted by Fred Knacker at 11:30am on Nov 23 2009]

@fred – It was the search referrers that gave it away. Servers store logs of searches from search engines as well as IP addresses. Once I started getting many hits for BdJ’s real name I realised there might be a problem. I then looked up the IP address which the search requests came from and saw they were from Associated Newspapers.

[posted by darren at 1:15pm on Nov 23 2009]

Ah – right. Thanks. Clever. You should be with MI5.

[posted by Fred Knacker at 2:14pm on Nov 23 2009]

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