Looking through the terms people typed into their favourite search engine to get here is always a fascinating glimpse into other people’s brains.
For example, I always had the sneaking suspicion that many people subscribe to HBO not so much because of the high quality of the programming offered there (because frankly, the quality isn’t all that hot), but mainly because HBO shows have sex scenes and quite a few of them. And as if to prove my point, I regularly get search strings like “what are HBO shows with good sex”, which lead the googlers to this post, which is one of the most popular on this site, because it attracts a lot of random porn googlers.
Talking of porn googler, someone landed at the same post by typing “american girl sexbad” into a search engine, “sexbad” as one word. I’m not even sure what this person was looking for. Confirmation that American women are bad in bed? In that case, I can’t help, because I have never slept with an American woman. Of course, it’s also possible that the googler was one of those creepy men’s rights types, who believe that American women are all spoiled and way too feminist and slutty and divorce happy, therefore American women should be boycotted in favour of women from abroad. Good for American women I say. Though part of me would love to see what happens when those creepy men’s rights types meet German or Dutch or Scandinavian women who are a lot less tolerant of sexist bullshit than many Americans.
Almost as fun as the porn googlers are people who misspell the words they type into Google. Of course, it is perfectly possible to mistype a word. It happened to me plenty of times. And some mistypings clearly indicate dyslexia. However, when the same word and the same search string is misspelled again and again, you start to wonder.
For example, today someone typed “is pliagerism a big issue in universitie” into a search engine and landed on one of my plagiarism posts. I don’t mean to sound judgmental, but if you’re attending university, maybe you should know how to spell “plagiarism” and “university”, even if you have no clue why plagiarism is wrong. On the other hand, if whoever misspelled that particular search string ever tries to plagiarize a term paper, catching him or her won’t be much of an issue. Just look for the bits that are spelled correctly.
As for other misspelled search terms, I had three visitors to this website misspell “prejudice” as “preduice” in the past few days. This might actually be due to dyslexia, but I still find it odd that all three visitors who mistyped “prejudice” were looking for information about class prejudice – pardon, preduice – in the Guardian.
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