If you have a look at yahoo’s results on TC’s article you will see that 3 of the top ten results are “Britney Spears”, “Jessica Alba”, and “Angelina Jolie”. I deeply apologize for saying that I do not think that guys searching for “Britney Spears” only search for song results ! So indeed people are looking for sex on the net, period. So where is this fact in Google’s results ?
The UK results are just too depressing : 1. facebook 2. bbc 3. youtube 4. ebay 5. games 6. news 7. hotmail 8. bebo 9. yahoo 10. jobs. Who can believe that Sun’s readers are not looking for something else ? About French results, who can believe that French lovers are only looking for weather and youtube ? Well, OK, Google does not tell us what French guys are watching on youtube…

Somehow the results are very biased. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert probably have an idea of what is going on. My feeling is that Google is not telling us exactly what they mean by query. Do they mean single query or complex query ? Let us say I look for Britney Spears sex (obviously this is for mathematical demonstration purpose only, I would never do that my dear sweetie if you read me), does this count for 1 query at “Britney Spears sex” or for 3 queries at Britney, Spears and sex. Results would be very different and using the first one will hide the word sex. So Google is most probably doing that. Web analytics experts are used to both kind of results. Indeed when you have a website you typically watch the queries leading to your site and you look both the single word queries and the sentence queries. Both give you different insights of what is going on. Knowing that Google is quite good at analytics, it is their business, I am deeply disappointed by the poor quality of the public statistical analysis of the queries they get.


The database made by the set of all the queries is just unbelievably interesting. That is the actual Google’s goldmine. First because they make their ads business out of it but also because they gather amazing intelligence information. This set is just the dream of any spy agency in the world. It is not only the most popular terms that are interesting. Using IP address, they can also check what every company is looking for on the net. They have access to the most private searches from people and company. Let’s say some guy somewhere makes a search on “a new mean to revolutionize the web search by using chaotical semantics”, well, Google knows it !


What I am saying here is that I expect a more thorough analysis of what people search because this data is after all people’ data. Anyway, if statistical data in general were more public, I guess I would not need to develop myself a public polling website.


Bonus: Writing this post I have a fun idea: making a simple website which is only a search engine, for instance using Google’s engine through the api. The only special thing it makes is to openly give a public access to all the queries. That could be fun.