Last Friday I saw the traffic to my site spike to previously unheard of levels, surpassing even the Joel Spolsky Effect. And it wasn’t because of my nonexistent OSCON blogging.

I had noticed previously that when you search for “google” using Google’s image search engine, an image I’d borrowed from the web for a long tail thinkpiece turned up in the fourth page of results, contributing on average about 20 hits/day.

Well at some point last week, the image started showing up in the first page of results, and I started getting several thousand hits a day from people searching for images of Google using Google. Here’s a graph of the number of hits to my site from people searching for “google” using Google over the last two months.

The question remains, why are so many people searching Google for Google?

Update: I decided to whip up a graph showing the number of times Google makes it hard… has been requested versus all other requests. It’s astounding that it’s represented 50% of my requests since early August.

Update: The image that was netting all the requests for “Google Makes it Hard” post dropped out of the results sometime between October 7th and 9th. Since then my overall page requests have come back down out of the stratosphere.