Oh dear, Google Trends #1 Hot Search today is “what to do if inside of girl gets wet”

June 3rd, 2008 � No Comments

Apologies in advance for this post. It is presented here for scientific reasons only…

And I kid you not. Here is the screenshot:

There seem to have been some problems with Google Trends over the last 24 hours with the content not updating for a while, and then this one rose to the top, circumventing any sanitation filters.

According to the Google Trends “About” page:
“Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather,” Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. Our algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.” (The emphasis on the last bit is mine-DD).

You may wonder how this all came about, and like a lot of things it started, innocently enough, when someone who was obviously in the midst of a barbeque, ran the following search: “what to do if inside of GRILL gets wet.” Google offered an alternative search, replacing “grill” with “girl”:

Google Search - too much optimisation

The guy obviously thought it all hilarious, and hurried to post it on Reddit, where it made the front page. The rest, as they say, is history…

To be fair to Google Trends, the terms “wet” and “girl” do not necessarily stand out as filth on their own. But it is still late afternoon in California, and you would have thought someone would notice. And while we’re on the subject, the copyright issue at the bottom of the page is a bit out of date, and still reads “2007″.

Update: I dropped Google Trends an email at 22.57 UK time, and within ten minutes I got a thank you back, and they removed the entry. I also noted to them the wrong copyright date. I should get a Google award, or something.

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