I made a promise to myself that I would try to restrict the number of occasions I would express amazement at how search engines bring traffic to Mount Sutro. Search engines do appropriately usher visitors looking for topics and content that are relevant to articles posted, but here and there the results are unexpected.

Often more astounding to me is how deeply people will go in search results. I may go through 20–40 pages of results (depending on the particular search engine and my ambition to locate something specific) but some people crawl through hundreds — yes, hundreds of pages of results.

But I digress. The point of this article is to point out one particular irregularity brought to me by the Google shopping engine, Froogle and the user in Omaha, Nebraska who initiated the search. If you search for the term “talking spongebob patrick” in Froogle and browse to results 41–70 you will find the following entry:

Yes, the Google back-end took three completely different and unassociated items and assembled them into a product that does not exist. Now obviously nothing further can happen due to this listing, save bring a few additional disappointed visitors, but the scenario leaves me wondering what other anomalies like this exist.

Update! Another search phrase results in the same faux-product listing, the curiously offensive “spongebob squarepants condoms.”

For completeness, the three articles sampled to create the above oddity are “Every Quarter Gets His Day,” “STS-114” (in the Linkage section) and “Attack of the Homosexual Agenda!“