I Know What You Searched With Google

Yesterday, Yahoo released its top queried keywords and let the world know just what level of interest in mundane things it has. Britney came in first, and my colon ties itself into a knot when I write this. It's Britney f**king Spears, she's history, leave bygones be bygones, whatever a bygone might be, don't trouble the socially dead, let them rest and have their peace. If she were to make a comeback with 30 pounds off and looking fabulous again, that would be ok, but if I see another shaved head or just a shaved Britney photo, I think I'll go berserk and get my sawed off shotgun and go to the closest plaza to conduct a pole on whoever thinks Britney is still a worthy top search candidate.

But enough about the Yahoo queries, let's go to Google for the retrospective "forecast". Here's the list and think about it if you see something amiss:
1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

Doesn't it strike you as odd that there's nothing worthy of your interest? I mean ok, there's the iPhone, but what about the news on Iran and Iraq or any other celebrities, except Britney? Oh, you do have Anna Nicole Smith, but she's dead, so she doesn't really count. For comparison, the Yahoo search had 6 female stars in its top 10 queries as opposed to just one, and that one looking rather dead-ish at the moment. As Gary Jules would say it, "mad world…"

Perhaps this might help us to better understand the way these results have been drawn: "we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 - the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006's most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005," as Google said the list was made last year. I think I see a pattern here.