I’m seeing in my web server logs that people are finding a previous Mark and Josh Valentine’s day cartoon, one I did in 2003…this one:

…and so I’m getting another wee traffic spike around here. What’s interesting is that they’re finding it via Yahoo Image Search for Valentine’s Day cartoons. Sure enough, you go to Yahoo and click on images and search on “valentine’s day cartoon” and that cartoon is the very first image in the list. But there is no plain text anywhere on the page containing the word “valentine”. The caption is part of the image file. There is no clear text in the image binary besides my copyright notice.

So how is the Yahoo search engine indexing that page to the words “Valentine’s day?” Is it OCR-ing the caption? Is it indexing it based on the date of publication? The information systems geek in me is curious.

Just for grins I tried the same search string on google images and that cartoon does not show up at all in the results. Yahoo’s doing something different.

Anyway…I feel a tad gratified that I could give same sex couples a little Valentine’s day presence, if only in a search engine. Not my intent…I basically preach to the choir here…but it’s satisfying all the same. Yes, this should be our day too.

[Update…] Josh had somewhat longer hair in that cartoon. But just for that one day. I was drawing their hair mussed up and I must have gotten a little carried away. Swear I didn’t even notice it until just now…