Google Knows What You Search For, Pervert

Note: the findings in this piece were accurate at the end of 2012. If you search Google Trends right now, at this very second, you might find different results. For example, as of January 21, 2013, Pakistan is the country that has dug into Google most often about “terrorism.” Feel free to poke around Google Trends yourself. It’s fun.

I want to congratulate the Australian and American readers. You’ve won. You sick fucks. Why were you searching Google for videos of guys putting needles in their balls or castrating themselves? Did you think that your searches would go unnoticed? You might think that you’re anonymous on the web, but Google knows who you are.

Curiosity gets the best of us sometimes. We’ve become so accustomed to having Google at our fingertips that we forget the power of what it does. We forget what it tracks. While Google can’t publish the confidential stuff, they do release a zeitgeist every year. The 2012 Zeitgeist is largely a redundant list of things everyone already knows. We know Gangmam Style was huge, we know The Hunger Games was a hit, we know everyone wants to know about the next big Apple product.

Sure, Zeitgeist has some significance in demonstrating cultural waves year after year. But what does it exclude? What do people search at 3 AM that they wouldn’t dare post to Facebook?

On Google Trends you can search anything you want. I took the opportunity to search for unusual fetishes, crude slang, and disturbing ideas. The results from this highly scientific experiment were truly surprising.

Related trendy searches for “how to make a bomb.”

Type in orgasm and you’ll find Zambia has searched it the most. Pakistan is curious about horse porn; South Africa wants to know how to make a bomb; Ghana is worried about gonorrhea; Nigeria, well, they searchedterrorism more than others. The list goes on, and despite every country in the G20 having access to the internet, some developing countries blew others out of the water when it came to taboo searches. But we’ll get to that later.

Google Trends doesn’t calculate the total number of searches made for a particular word. Instead, the search engine uses relative volumes. Since Kenya searched dog porn the most, the relative volume is 100. Next came Pakistan with the volume of 64, and India with 49. These numbers tell us that if people in Kenya searched dog porn approximately 100 times, Pakistan searched it 64 times, etc.

Google Trends, and the Zeitgeist in particular, reflects moments that capture what’s going on in the world. The results are mirrored in a graph that also depicts points in the year where the media publishes a story on the topic.

HOLLAND

Girls who dig fashion are all about the new wave, future pixie-goth vibe at the moment. Eyeliner savagely smeared all over your eyes like some sort of paralytic Robert Smith is now totally normal, as long as you’re wearing velvet leggings, a maxi-skirt, a lace top, plenty of elaborate jewelry, creepers, and have faded pastel-colored hair. If not, then you’re just someone who’s terrible at putting on make-up. Until recently, if you wanted to look babin’, skirts had a mandatory “no lower than the knee” rule, but longer is now sexier. Aynouk, our fashion girl, is a perfect example of that rule set in motion. She’s one-upped most other girls, though, and taken it to the “nearly difficult to walk” level of sexiness.

Global Trend Report - The Sexual Habits of the Entire World (Almost-ish)

“I can’t believe what the young girls will do these days,” says Andre, a half-French guy we’ve known for years. His job is to travel from city to city and go to parties where he meets hundreds of new people every night. “The things I’ve heard people say, and the things I’ve seen myself. I mean, it’s shocking.”