Last night, we got a taste of our very first taste of a debate night duel. On one side, we had our typical, Fox News-facilitated pageantry of foot-stomping candidates vying for our love. On the other side, we got Trump. As for you—well, you had questions.
For some time we'd heard about someone named John Munson, though we'd never met him. Then on Friday we turned on Jeopardy and saw an ascot-wearing contestant with a phallic signature introduced as a "gadabout". It was John Munson.
An airplane flies into two vertical objects: For many ordinary New Yorkers, it's a horrible, still-living memory. For Internet commenters, it's absolutely hilarious.
Google's Hot Trends page has been gamed before, but today's #1 spot is the best ever — a dorky-white-guys rock band named Captain Caucasian and the Raging Idiots. No KKK references, just a bunch of guys with guitars and a singer whose baseball cap is two sizes too big. While we wait for Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow to explain how this is a huge, huge victory for real people over the evil corporate monster that is the music industry, Google, or maybe it's Starbucks, I crawled through the band's traffic-slammed website to dig up their video for "Bust a Move."
Want to know why newspapers are dying? Because they've been running boring cover stories about that confusing economic meltdown on Wall Street instead of what Americans really care about — stuff like wizards, cupcakes and sex toys. Bristol Palin headlines can stay above the fold, though. Online searchers love them some pregnant teenagers with high school-dropout baby daddies. [Mother Jones]
A tipster's discovered Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's LinkedIn profile and handily pointed out the poor intern who had to put it together's typos. Surprised anyone bothered to find it? Don't be. According to Google Trends, Sarah Palin gets more search queries than either of the two men at the top of the tickets. Probably doesn't hurt that Google counts what Hitwise says are the very many searches for "Sarah Palin Vogue Magazine," "Sarah Palin Photos," "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos," "Sarah Palin Nude," and "Sarah Palin Naked." With his strong cheek bones and steely-eyed stare, John McCain is a very handsome man, but not many of us need to see him naked. The Internet's obsession for Sarah Palin, according to the Google Trends chart below, seems to know no bounds.
Google Trends is a fun yet depressing tool which can show you search trends for various terms like "cat leash" or "where are my wife and kids?" Recently some trickster at RivalFish put in dirty terms like "bukkake" and "ladyboy" to see what cities are searching the most for what. (Honolulu for both of those, as it turns out.) Yay dirty words! That amusing data can be found here, and after the jump we've done a little mini Gawker-themed geographical Google trend reporting.
On this, the eve of the first state primary in years where the outcome is not already a horrifically boring given, rest assured the fate of the country is finally in the hands of the wise and wonderful people who search for stuff on the Internets. Some of the hottest Google search terms today?
Yesterday we poked fun at the Huffington Post for tagging their Heath Ledger posts with Tuesday's second fastest-rising Google search term "Keith Ledger." But according to commenters, tipsters and your mom, it turns out they did it on purpose, in order to catch web traffic from the legions of deaf, misspelling Google searchers who have never read USWeekly ever.
