Via Finoculous, the list is here. Some of the odder terms were:
- "Webkinz" (#16)
- "Runescape" (#37)
- "Nigahiga" (#99)
- "Miniclip" (#18)
- "Poptropica" (#54)
- "Hoedown Throwdown" (#61)
"Runescape" of course I know (yet without understanding it) from reading MR spam; the rest were a mystery to me. #1 was "YouTube."
You’ve never head of Webkinz? Wow.
I’ll note that #77 appears to be part of a search to disable parental controls
“Google” was a search term in Google, and #2 at that?
@MPO
Many users get confused between the search bar and the address bar. Also, if the URL is invalid (“google”), Internet Explorer will use the default search engine (often Google) to search for the invalid URL, then redirect the user to a search page. The user ends up where s/he intended to be, so this behavior doesn’t change and becomes ingrained.
The end result is, yes, that Google users end up googling for Google. The top search term on Bing and Yahoo is “Google”, unsurprisingly, and the top term on Google is “Yahoo”. The second term on Google is now “Google”, edging out the former top contender “sex”.
Holy. My kids want to play webkinz round the clock. Miniclip is flash games. Hoedown Throwdown is a godawful Hannah Montana song, as are they all.
As a 21-year-old who, by proximity of age, is indirectly familiar with many of the terms on the list, I find a good deal of amusement in the explanatory text: the fact that it was required for the target audience, the choice of explanatory text on certain terms and not others, and the wording of the text on some of the choices. (Did “Harry Potter” really need an explanation?)
…and it was probably only the one guy, too.
The absence of iCarly makes me skeptical about the data.
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