There is an article in this month’s Wired about Google searches, and what they say about the culture. The author watched 24 hours of searches whiz by at Google company headquarters.

Back in the day, Lycos used to make this information publicly available on demand. You could go to their site and see a random sampling of what people were searching for at any given time. Back then some people actually used Lycos. When the company I worked for first got Internet access piped through their network, we had a lot of fun with the feature. Prior to that you had to go to a dedicated dial-up machine and get online at 24kbps. This is one of those things I will crankily tell my grandchildren about. But I digress.

Anyway, being able to watch people’s search queries was a little sobering. For one thing, it made it horribly clear that the art of spelling even simple words had been entirely lost. For another, about 75% of the queries had to do with sex, which at the time meant plaintive, misspelled pleas for photos of Pamela Anderson Lee and, as astonishing as it is today, Anna Nicole Smith. And there were a whole lot of even less wholesome queries, unsuitable for reprinting in a nice family blog like this one.

Lycos still has a feature showing the most popular searches, but it is doesn’t have the raw, voyeuristic quality of the old site. I blame lawyers.

But if you have a website with decent logging capability, you can tell what people who found your site through search engines were looking for. And this can be fairly revealing. Or disgusting. Or both.

Many a fetishist has come to the Empire because they went searching for “braless” or “braless wives.” More than one oddball has found us by searching for “women and tiparillos,” a fetish I had never even conceived of. All I can say about these people is that they ought to spend more time in the British Club in Mohandiseen.

But not every sick bastard on the Internet is sick in a sexual way. Or at least not just in a sexual way. One of the most consistently popular searches that ends in the Empire is “gory photos.” But sickest of all are the many people that go out of their way to find “muzak.”