Google lifted the veil this week on one of its best-kept secret: Which nations search for what?

Who looks up "corruption" most avidly? Who seeks out "terrorist" most faithfully? Who types in "drugs" or "sex" most frequently?

No country’s secrets are spared.

The site introduced Thursday, Google Trends, measures how often particular phrases are searched for from computers in individual countries and cities. It short-lists the places with the highest absolute number of searches for, say, "sex". Then it picks the top 10 or so based on which places look up "sex" much more than they do other things, for instance, "love".

The Google Trends site is likely to generated a mix of consternation, embarassment and laughter around the world. While Google stresses its efforts to protect individual’s privacy, the new site does nothing to protest the collective privacy of nations and this sort of feature reminds us that the internet is global, yet not one undifferentiated mass.

Searches for "terrorist" surprisingly, come overwhemingly from Singapore! Is the Government or its people that are fascinated by the terrorist word or …. ?

As for Malaysia, our kingdom ranks No. 5 in searches for "corruption", a rung above Indonesia and two rungs above Singapore.

This should be useful to search engine optimisers, and people in advertising and marketing, who’ll be able to compare brands over time. For the rest of us, it’s just amusing to compare, basically almost everything.

But the results may not be accurate. Google Trends is only based on a subset of Google searches, choice of term can make a lot of difference, and as with normal Google searches, a lot of the results are probably not genuine.

But a result like this one might say something interesting for you? LOL!

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