I love pages that keep track of search requests on the internet. Pages like Lycos’ Top 50. These give you a real insight into the community of the internet’s most obsessive interests. And of course the most interesting thing about them is how many of the listings in the top fifty that you just have never heard of. A community of net users? Where? I see many communities. Of course most of the search terms would be instantly familar to most American teenagers and early twenty-somethings I imagine… Or would they?
Google’s got a page like this too – although it’s updated more randomly. But it does have the amusing benefit of pulling out randomly entertaining figures and presenting them as charts. This week, for example…
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By far the most interesting of these little enterprises however is Yahoo’s Buzz index – which manages to track both the most searched for keywords, but also to be able to track rapid movers, surges or lapses of interest – and over a vast range of categories as well… Who is the US obsessing about at the moment? Anna Nicole Smith – what movie is the world suddenly more interested in than usual? Er… Willow? Well it can’t get it right all the time… Do you know of any other parts of search engines that track information like this? If so, let me know.