Other People's Searches

Some call it the great human experiment, others call it Internet voyeurism. In truth, it's probably just a perfectly good waste of time. Call it what you will, it's great fun to see what other people search for on the web. Here's where to go to take a peek at other people's searches. Each of the search engines tracks its own users' popular searches, which makes for some interesting social commentary.

Yahoo! Buzz looks at keyword searches on Yahoo!. On my visit (December 13), searches for Lindsay and Britney were in a downward spiral, but oh that NFL! And Christmas was inching its way up the list. The unlikely search went to a pudgy boy from China, named Little Fatty, who's created an Internet stir.

Google Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist, according to Google, is defined as "the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era," and you will find it here. For the week ending December 9, Google Zeitgeist found James Kim, Pearl Harbor, and NASA in the top three positions. To get their spin on the search trends, you can watch Google Current.

At Ask.com, based on its site's traffic, you can find out what people are searching for, too. For the week of December 8, it was Britney, MySpace, video, and cars.

AOL.com stood out from the crowd. On December 12, the most popular search involved Uncle Sam's grave becoming a tourist site, but when it breaks out popular searches by category, you'll see more familiar listings like Britney topping the music category.

At the Lycos 50 "poker" tops the list of popular search terms. It also looks across an entire year of searches to list the Iraq conflict and World Cup in the numbers one and two positions.

MetaCrawler's Metaspy is fun because you can watch searches being performed in real time and not have to wait for someone to report on what's going on. It updates every 15 seconds. For adults there's an unfiltered version called Exposed.

Disclosure: Yahoo! Tech is an online service owned and offered by Yahoo!, Inc., which also offers Yahoo! Buzz.