I haven’t mentioned search terms for a while, but one that drew in the punters to the sciencebase site stood out in my recent trawl of the site logs – “crystallized ink”. Now, what’s all that about? I wondered.
At first, I assumed it was someone worrying about their little pot of Indian blue going all glacial on them (as is the wont of certain types of honey and concentrated acetic acid solutions). But, then I thought maybe the pen manufacturers, in a bid to recapture a dwindling market for handwriting implements, had come up with a way to add a glittery appearance to the extruded product of their implements…
A quick Google, however, revealed that crystallized ink, at least on the basis of the page one SERP is a product of science fiction – an ink that can oscillate between two states: visible and invisible. This product could thus be used to create animations on the page without the need for a conventional computer screen. The main citation is on this page http://lattice.mysteryandmagic.com/reference.a.html. Pull back to the top-level and you will a sci-fi game called The Lattice (semantically the name is reminiscent of another sci-fi genre, I’d say). So, that was an intriguing find.
But.
Trawling the logs a bit deeper revealed the keyphrase “clogged printer head”. A quick cross-check revealed that the search had come from the same IP within a couple of minutes. So, I suspect our inkvestigator was actually just looking for information on how to unblock their printer rather than either anything as archaic as Quink or as futuristic as animated ink.
Shame.