A long time ago I decided to make use of an electronic scrabble dictionary by using it to build an anagram dictionary. Many years later, I happened to mention that in the course of a discussion in the newsgroup, alt.anagrams and put it online. Checking the logs, next to no one looked at it. A few weeks later I found a fair amount of people all round the world, especially domains ending in .edu, looking at the anagrams file - about 10 a day. Curious, I put a msg at the beginning of the document asking where they found it, assuming some anagram page had put in a link. It took ages for a reply but finally I was told a search engine had picked up on it. Whether they search through Usenet looking for URL's or someone submitted it I do not know.

Anything with that many words is going to show up on a huge number of web spider searches. But the number of hits per day climbed to 100! Now and I get a couple of e-mails per day from good souls explaining how they found the site, even though I took the message down as soon as the first person replied. I first assumed there were some proxy servers sending out the old copy. But then I saw how the reference to it looks on Alta Vista:

No Title Hi! For some reason this file has become a very popular request! Could someone please mail me and tell me what page links to this? I don't mind in the... anagrams.htm - size 34K - 12 Jun 96

With this little message, the file is not only coming up eventually in a fair proportion of all searches, but it also had a summary that aroused people's curiosity. Thus the flood.

I had no intention of experimenting with the web or trying to lure web users into my den. When web crawlers drop by next, the little message wondering why the file's so popular will be replaced by the title above.

It's interesting the number of anagrams that are fitting: Eternity and entirety, backward and drawback, discern and rescind, demand and madden, comedian and demoniac, American and cinerama, aspirate and parasite, oldies and soiled, lust and slut, to name a few of many hundreds. Certainly there'd be some impact on the meanings and popularity of words from how they sound and look. To some small degree we've been subconsciously shaping our language to make nice anagrams since it began.