What are we all looking for?

This post will not be as philosophical as the title might suggest. Rather, I have been looking at the top searches as reported by two search engines, Google and Yahoo. The first thing to note is that they are quite different from each other. Here are the current top searches on Google:

1. weiner facts
2. sammy sosa
3. franz hanning
4. numerology
5. face reading
6. numerology calculator
7. east stroudsburg university
8. dennis earl bradford
9. numerology compatibility
10. lee dewyze halleluja video

Two things strike me here. In the case of five of the items, I have absolutely no idea what they are about. None. What on earth might ‘weiner facts’ be? A couple of the others are just strange: why should ‘face reading’ be so popular, and what’s the big deal with East Stroudsburg University? But what amazes me most is that numerology should make three appearances in this list; what does that tell us?

And now, here is the very different list from Yahoo:

1. Rima Fakih
2. Amazon Ebook Reader Central
3. Dancing With the Stars
4. Amy Adams
5. NBA
6. Hulu
7. Dow Jones Index
8. Claudia Schiffer
9. American Idol
10. LeBron James

Again four items in relation to which I am wholly ignorant, but in this list there is a more visible presence of celebrity culture.

What interests me also is that, in both lists, there appear to be absolutely no items relevant to either local or global news. There is also a hint here that on the internet people live in little worlds of their own – though clearly some of these get to be big enough to pick up some real communities. But these communities avoid the arts, politics and science, and they are much less technology focused than you might expect from people using the internet.

We do live in a strange world.

The search goes on and on

Previously – once last year and another time earlier this year – I have published the terms some readers entered in their search engines that brought them to this blog. It is still the case that some really unusual searches are attempted by some people, where I would not only wonder how it brought them to this blog, but would wonder more generally what on earth they think they could find anywhere. Here are some samples:

are there any universities named after c?
does ireland have shipping container architecture? [well, does it?]
i do not want an education
my father was from ireland who are my cousins?
I can speak German
into them up to the neck
[one I like particularly] how to curse at a typewriter

And here are some with deeper philosophical, or maybe psychological, issues:

what’s going on in us?
why are people so bad?
do people really exist?

Also since the last time I have apparently become a world authority on sex. Here are some of the risqué search terms that got people to this blog:

private sex in the car
naked women using powerpoint
teaching naked in a university
beautiful naked women in power point presentations

In fact, a total of over 150 people got to this blog in the last week alone by entering ‘curvy women’ as their search term (not including the three who entered ‘the most curvy woman ever’).

So maybe I need to go along with the one reader who got here by entering ‘dear oh dear’.