What To Find on the Interwebs

So, my friend Jared and I were joking around about getting more hits on our blogs.

Jared just had a posting from his blog put on a consumer site (I can't remember which one, sorry), and he saw a huge spike in his blog hits today. It was pretty cool.

Thus to get more hits, we thought that we should add some appropriate labels and or terms to a post, thus attracting attention. It was a funny joke. Funny enough that I looked for the top searched words and phrases on the internet for the past few days. And I know what you're thinking: just start with the word "porn" and go downhill from there. I thought that same thing.

I was stunned.

The top searched thing was "myspace". Which, in case this is somehow the very first website that you have ever visited, is the name of a popular website. Right behind it were "google", "ebay" and "yahoo". Again, websites. And what's more, two of them are search engines. Do people actually search for search engines? Further on down the list also includes "msn" and "ask.com". Total confusion.

The first porn related entry was at #14 on the list, and that was "Jenna Jameson". Not exactly a newcomer to the industry, it's good to see that Jenna has been able to hold the attention of the sexual side of the internet for this long.

I really expected more adult entertainment aspects to the search engine check-up, but both music stars and video games had far more entries, as well as higher ranking entries than the old libido. (Though I was surprised--and disappointed--that my video game of choice, World of Warcraft, didn't make the cut for the top 500 searches.)

What's the meaning and purpose of all this? Well, I guess that there is still some things that surprise us. I would say that there is still "hope for humanity", but I'm not a person that feels that looking at things sexual in nature--so long as those sexual matters are between mature, consenting adult humans--is necessarily a bad thing.

So, when your first thought about the internet is that it's nothing but a conduit for porn: think again. Apparantly it's a conduit for people to use search engines to search for...search engines.

Well, I guess you can worry after all.