The Keebler cookie factory used to be nearby. That could explain it. Or maybe it’s the small liberal arts college that inspires so many dirty thoughts, though I’m more given to thinking it’s because of Immaculate Conception High School and Timothy Christian High School. After all, repression and guilt-addled masturbatory fantasies make for the most basic of urges, you know? Because the fact is, for all of last year, Elmhurst, Ill., population about 43,000, home of the Sunshine Biscuit Co. and former home of the largest Chevy dealer in the United States and pretty much quaint upscale yuppie Anytown, U.S.A., was the American city that looked up the term “sex” most frequently on Google.
I’m fascinated by the breadth and depth of the Internet. I’m not certain that it’s even possible for a single mere mortal to grasp the sheer volume and variety of information that is available online…and it grows on a daily basis. One of Google’s latest widgets is Google Trends, which allows you to, among other things, see which cities in the world are searching for certain types of information. F’rinstance, Houston is #9 in the world when it comes to searching for “oral sex” (Bucharest, Romania is #1). Yeah…guess what’s on our minds, eh??
If you let your imagination (and your libido) wander, you can learn some interesting (albeit completely useless) things. For example, enter the search term “group sex”, and the top three searching cities are in India (Delhi, Chennai, and Mumbai). Hmm…perhaps those Hindus aren’t nearly as repressed as we may have thought. And should we best disturbed that the top four cities searching for “underage sex” are from Australia and New Zealand (Brisbane, Auckland, Perth, and Melbourne)?
Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that interesting? Sort of?…. [I]t’s random, semipractical stuff like this that makes it difficult to hate Google for whoring out to China and for becoming the new Microsoft and for their billionaire geek teenager CEOs….
Google Trends. It is utterly fascinating, at least for a while. It is cool and useful and at the same time enormously frustrating due to its obvious limitations, though I imagine it will spawn enormous amounts of titillating filler for countless PR firms and marketers and research papers and news reports that cite all sorts of vague data that seems to tell you something really important but when you stop and think about it doesn’t really tell you all that much at all. You know, just like religion.
Of course, Google Trends does have it’s limits. Try inputting “Republican ethics”, and you’ll get this message:
Your terms - republican ethics - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.
Yeah, I know…we’re searching for something that apparently doesn’t exist…. Thankfully, “Ann Coulter naked” yields the same result. Perhaps there is hope for humanity after all. (My former homertown- Portland, OR- is #1 when searching for “Worst President Ever”…and you wonder why I miss Portland? Houston was #9.)
This is all good, but totally useless, information. Then again, if you weren’t looking to waste time, you wouldn’t be here at TPRS, would you??
