these results are definitely indicative of what is most important to the average american, but they're extremely filtered (obviously; it's yahoo). for a more candid look - a couple of months ago, a guy at another board i post at offered up a list of the most popular search engine queries from a 24-hour period on a random day. since this is just one day, it differs from the overall results that yahoo found. here's the top 50:

of course, the hits continue later on down the list of 1,000, with classics such as "nipple slip", "kim possible porn", and "jesse mccartney". so, yeah, society has issues.

Maybe it's because trying to find a reliable source of actual news is pointless on the internet so you might as well search for fat white tits.

your lack of faith in the internet disturbs me.

so are people other than me still using the internet as it was originally intended? For the further research of pornography and pipe bombs!

[Edited on Dec 20, 2005 by traceelement]

Brown Bunny was top search mover in August!

I search for mostly:
Brittney Spears.
Jessicas Simpsons.
American Idol
Paris Hiltons
and USHER!

Wait,
I just had a thought...

Yahoo has a "NEWS" box off to the side of their search engine. In theory the American people never have to actually use the "search" button to find their news, because this box offers a direct link to the top stories that Yahoo deems important. Therefore the search box is more often used for those things people don't have any clue as to how to find (like the pictures of Britney's nipple slip, so they can jerk off without their mommy and dad finding out because of the key stroke recorder program they installed on the computer a few months back).

Also most people know how to type in:

cnn.com

I used to work for a search engine back in the day, and in reality, the top 10 searched words we tracked on a day-to-day basis broke down like this:

8 words were sex related: sex, pussy, fucking, etc.
2 other words searched: 'and', 'the'. (Usually before one of the above 8)

We used to report "top search items" to outsiders and upper management, and we'd usually leave those ones out. Heh.

I just want statistics on how many people just searched for Natalee Halloway b/c of this list.

Google's most recent Zeitgeist is September 2005, and it looks like the international community isn't any more intellectual or compassionate than we are:

Australia
1. paris hilton
4. jessica alba
6. hilary duff
14. hurricane katrina

Chile
1. horoscopo
2. avril lavigne
3. my chemical romance
15. katrina

And so on and so forth.

Isn't Natalee Holloway that girl that got abducted in Aruba?

^^^ suspect??

Porn kittens

My question is, who actually searches for anything with Yahoo!?

Consider the userbase and the results won't be that surprising.

I think the key word in the story is "Yahoo." Yahoo is more of a start page than a search page. It's for people that are "lightweight" users of the web.

Results from Googlefight follow: Iraq beats "Britney Spears," which beats out "Hurricaine Katrina," though there were two hurricaines, and "hurricaine" is a bit tricky for the average schmuck to spell. Then again, so is "Britney."

It says "the world" in the page headline, so don't pin all of this on shallow americans. Our crappy media stars are lowering the bar worldwide.