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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?

great detective work!

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

Nice one, well done. Good work.

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

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…

@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.

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

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