Who Are These Idiots and Who Gave Them Internet Access?

Patrick Gaskill was certainly struck by Inspirado when he created his Suggested Google Alphabet page. Here you can see an up-to-the-second list of the most popular search terms per letter of the alphabet entered into Google.

Unfortunately, it only confirms that the internet has been taken over by morons.

Because Patrick’s page updates with every hit, what you see by following the link above may be different from what I list here, but that’s not enough to stop me from making fun of the most popular searches as listed on 1/26/2005.

A is for amazon
B is for best buy
C is for cnn
D is for dictionary
E is for ebay

OK, right off the bat we’ve got 5 instances of people searching for the actual domain name of the site they’re looking for. The URL for Amazon is www.amazon.com you dumbass. As my good friend Larry would say, “What’s the number for 911?”. Granted, dictionary.com isn’t the only dictionary on the web, but it’s certainly the easiest to remember, and it also happens to be the top-ranked result Google gives (as of now anyway).

F is for Firefox

OK, wait. Maybe the internet hasn’t been taken over by morons after all. It really does give me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that so many people are looking for my favorite web browser. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, run—don’t walk—to the Firefox website, download it, install it and never use Internet Explorer again. You need reasons other than some asshole’s recommendation? OK, you see, IE is a piece of shit. Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is to get a virus or pick up spyware from going to a web site? That that can happen boggles the fucking mind. It’s almost as if IE was specifically written to allow it. Firefox won’t fuck with you that way. It won’t even allow popups if you don’t let it. And if that’s not enough, tabbed browsing rules. And did I mention the shitloads of extensions and themes for customization? Oh yeah, it’s also completely free.

Another reason the F entry gives me a little hope is that until recently, the URL for Firefox was not www.firefox.com. It actually was worthy of a search! On the downside, they may be searching for that shitty Clint Eastwood movie.

G is for games

Yeah, I suppose. Have fun sifting through the 360,000,000 results!

H is for hotmail
I is for ikea

I don’t know whether to ridicule people who search for these or pity them. Oh wait, of course I do.

J is for jokes

Welcome to the information super-highway, a tool that rivals the printing press for revolutionizing communication. Let’s look up some jokes to tell at the office.

K is for kazaa

While the address for this is in fact www.kazaa.com, I’m hoping they’re actually looking for an early version that doesn’t fill your PC with spyware. Or maybe they’re confusing Kazaa and Limewire. Or maybe they’re actually searching for that shitty Shaquille O’Neal movie.

L is for lyrics

Is it just me or are lyrics sites fucking horrendous with these days? Thank gods that the fucking Harry Fox Agency sued lyrics.ch into submission years ago. Now instead of one good site we have a thousand little shitty ones all pushing spyware and popups. They also completely fucked up OLGA. I hope those fucking cocks at HFA choke on their mothers’ shit.

M is for mapquest

You’re searching for Mapquest when the address is mapquest.com? You know what? You’re too stupid to drive.

N is for news

Since there’s maybe 2 or 3 news sites (tops) out there, you’ll surely find exactly what you’re looking for by punching “news” into Google.

O is for online dictionary

As opposed to all the print dictionaries that turn up on the web.

P is for paris hilton

Oh, give me a fucking break. If you give two fucks about this spoiled little rich cunt, please get the fuck off the internet and back in your trailer you pathetic waste of skin. If you’re looking for her porn video, that’s even worse. This woman (and I use the term loosely) is the very definition of skank. Her snatch is likely a rancid cesspool of hitherto unknown variations of herpes and at least one heroin-resistant strain of chlamydia.

Also, you can’t tell me the number one search for ‘P’ isn’t ‘Porn’. I think this was some judicious editing by the folks at Google.

Q is for quotes

Because nothing else starts with Q.

R is for recipes

Yeah, fine. Too bad you can’t even make toast.

S is for spybot

If everyone were to heed the collective advice of the geek community and forsake Internet Explorer for Firefox, nobody would need Spybot. You do need to pretty much use Google every time you want to find it though, because the URL (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/) is impossible to remember and spybot.com, .org and .net are all owned by assholes filching on Spybot’s good name. So this entry is pretty awesome. People are using Spybot, which is good, and using Google for something that actually needs searched for. As Chief Gunnery Sgt. Hartman would say, out-fucking-standing!

T is for tara reid

Looking for the titty pictures I’m sure.

But T should really stand for Thunderbird to go along with F for Firefox. The only internet application more likely than Microsoft Internet Explorer to give you a virus is Microsoft Outlook (noticing a pattern here?). If you run Outlook, dump it immediately and install Thunderbird. It’s better anyway, it’s free, and it has built in spam controls. And extensions and themes, of course.

U is for ups

I’ll say it very slowly: double-you… double-you… double-you… you… pee… ess… dot… com… you… dumb… fucking… turd.

V is for verizon

Well, thanks to shitty web design, Verizon has made the list for V. Thing is, 9 out of 10 people are looking for www.verizonwireless.com, but verizon.com brings up local service, DSL, and other crap that maybe some people on the east coast actually give a rat’s fuck about. There’s a link for wireless buried deep on that page, which takes you to another page with more crap, which then, finally, has a link to www.verizonwireless.com. Here’s a hint to the dumbasses who designed the Verizon site: Go to Google and enter “usability“.

W is for weather

I’m sure that entering “weather” into the strongest search engine on what is a vast global network of computers delivering information in all languages to all corners of the earth gave you exactly what you were looking for—the weather for Toledo Ohio on the morning of 01/26/2005.

And um, incidentally, there’s www.weather.com.

X is for xbox

Damn, I was rooting for Xenology Today.

Y is for yahoo

Dude, seriously. You’re not really that dumb, are you?

Z is for zip codes

Yeah, I can live with that.

Now that this horse is obviously dead, it’s time to beat it.

Of the most popular search terms for the 26 letters of the English alphabet:

• 10 letters (A, B, C, E, H, I, K, M, U & Y) were searches for the main part of the actual domain name of the site that was obviously being searched for. That’s roughly 38.5%. The mind boggles.
• 4 letters (D, V, W & X) were searches that would have taken you to a site that probably would have given you what you wanted had you surrounded it with “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.
• 6 letters’ searches (G, J, L, N, Q & W) were very vague. Narrow it down people. Try “toledo weather” or “lawyer jokes” or “general tso chicken recipe”.
• 1 letter (O) was redundant with another letter (D).
• 2 letters (P & T) were for stupid shit that nobody should care about.
• 5 letters (F, S, V, X & Z) were actually for useful searches.

Yes, I know those numbers add up to 28. A couple letters (W & X) made it into two categories.

Now I must ask, are people really so dumb they punch “amazon” into Google rather than typing www.amazon.com into the address bar? I think that’s probably the case, but there are some other possibilities I’ve come up with, listed below.

#1: Google steals focus

If google.com is your start page (it should probably be everybody’s) if you open your browser and begin typing in the address bar, you’ll likely get part of what you were typing in the address bar and part in the Google search box, especially if you are on dialup. This is because once the Google main page has loaded, the cursor is automagically positioned in the search box, regardless of whether or not you’re typing. Pressing enter then submits to Google.

While this can be a problem, I think the likelihood of it accounting for painfully obvious searches is small. It could up the instance of searches for “mazon.com” or “w.yahoo.com”, but not “amazon” or “yahoo” by themselves.

#2: Major web sites hacking Google

The idea here is that Amazon, Yahoo, Mapquest and Paris Hilton could be running programs that automatically submit thousands of searches to Google in an attempt to up their ranking. I don’t think this actually affects the rankings (I could be wrong, I’m not fully-versed in Google’s ranking criteria). Rankings are adjusted by the number of times a particular result link is followed, but just bulk searching may not have an effect. Even if it does, I’m sure the folks at Google are smart enough to discount consecutive hits from the same IP block when calculating the rankings.

This explanation also completely fails Hanlon’s Razor.

#3: People don’t know what the address bar is or what it’s for

It sounds crazy, but there’s people out there who have their start page set to some search engine or another (hopefully it’s Google) and don’t know how to enter an address. I overheard a conversation between my wife and a another person once where my wife was saying “open Internet Explorer (this was in the pre-Firefox days) and enter ‘www.weather.com’…OK, now see the zip code box…?” They didn’t see the zip code box. Eventually we asked what they did see, and it was something along the lines of “Yahoo search results”. They were searching Yahoo for www.weather.com, unaware that a URL goes up in the address bar.

I consider this separate from the “fucking morons” theory because I realize that there are plenty of otherwise smart people out there who are clueless about computers, just as I am clueless about calculus and playing the harp. I’ve actually even seen computers come with the browser installed so that the address bar is hidden in a cheap attempt to force users to use some shitty search engine.

#4: The internet has been taken over by morons

OK, I think you know where I stand on that one.

As an interesting side note, I’m going to mention that almost a month has past between my first seeing the Suggested Google Alphabet page and writing this. In that time I don’t think any of the search words have changed. Interestingly, since that page links live to searches for the most popular terms, it will have an effect on the most popular terms and help to keep them popular. Ironic, no?

So there you have it. When I decided to write this, I had no idea it was going to inspire such virulent rage on my part. All I can say in my defense is that the site’s called Bile Duct for a reason and that I fucking hate Paris Hilton. And the Harry Fucking Fox Agency.

On the upside, if all these words are such popular search terms, I should get a lot of inadvertent hits. Yay!