All Time Most Popular-What are we all Searching For?
Posted: Sunday, January 11, 2009
by Jon Searles
The internet has become an amazing point of information for all of us. Its scope and content are almost too much to conceive. Web sites are adding almost continually to this World Wide Web. It was started by a few, expanded by many, and yet owned by no one. The information contained seems to be as limitless as the human spirit and as decadent as the human imagination. The English language has expanded to include words and phrases that are understood by anyone who has "surfed the web" or spent the day "blogging". We have learned how to Ebay, You Tube, My Space, and Instant Message. The world is at our fingertips as we Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Email, and Explore.
We now turn our attention to SearchWarp.com and its "All Time Most Popular" and I find myself equally as perplexed. Hair care seems to be a major reading focus. Relationships also seem to be an attention getter (I will list the article How to Know You are Pregnant, the 18 First Signs of Pregnancy by Natalie Williams in this category). Finally a little escapism with Nintendo and PSP gaming is of interest. If I were Malcolm Gladwell, the writer who draws amazing conclusions from interesting statistics and historic information, I would say that the SearchWarp.com visitors are interested in having great hair as they struggle with finding meaningful relationships with others and if that fails they find a way to use that energy in the virtual world of gaming. Okay, so maybe that is quite a stretch. My suggestion to SearchWarp.com would be to reset the list for 2009 to see how it changes. I found myself drawn to the articles currently occupying the "All Time Most Popular" box to investigate writing styles and find out what pulled in so many readers. I am sure many have done the same to see what elevated the topics to the top, thereby elevating the topics even higher.
Censorship of web topics is something I am passionate about and surely some of you just bristled at the word. Censorship for me would involve structuring access to internet topics. I do that now with my computer settings since I have children in my home. Some believe there is no limit to what can be put on the web and it is their right to share whatever they want; be it legal or illegal, moral or immoral, truth or lie. Thankfully, web sites are able to set standards of behavior and content and we as individuals can pick the sites we care to visit.
In our household we are quick to discuss internet hoaxes, urban legends, and scams from the web. Unfortunately, I have friends that still believe Barack Obama was not born in the United States because they believed in the internet hoaxes that were spread upon the web in 2008. After all, if it is on the internet, it must be true. Surely many of you saw the world's biggest cat, the dog as big as a horse, and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a red white and blue bikini holding an automatic rifle? How many of you have sent money to a Middle Eastern man waiting for his trust fund to become available?
Ultimately we are all searching for something. We are searching for a way to live vicariously through others, searching to find the best ginger chicken recipe, searching to be a better person, searching for what we crave, searching to find someone to share our searching with, searching for something to make our lives more meaningful or at least searching to escape our current existence if only for a short time.
The success of YouTube, Face book, My Space, plethora of dating sites, and the continuing growth of Searchwarp.com appears to point to each of our desire to find out if we would be more successful in our searching when we search for others who are also searching.
Do you ever wonder what Britney Spears or Paris Hilton searches for when they open Internet Explorer?
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)John I'm sure that those interested in the topic presented will find your article informative and interesting.Please log in to respond to this comment.Thank you Robert.Have a great week.Please log in to respond to this comment.
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