Bizarre Things People Google
(June 
— There’s no such thing as a stupid question, but on the Internet, there’s a compendium of bizarre ones.
For his day job at a Washington, D.C., communications company, Jason Hellmann studies how people use search engines like Google and AOL to find what they’re looking for on the Internet — a field called search engine optimization, or SEO.
In his spare time, he maintains the website SEOLOL.net, where he highlights the strangest prompts that Web users have asked online.
“It started out with me just looking through pretty common search terms, but once you get to the lower end — the long-tail terms — that’s when you start seeing some of the wacky stuff,” he told AOL News.
Since he started the website last year, Hellmann has posted bizarre queries like “can a horse have OCD?” and odd prompts like “hermit crab addiction,” cries for help like “sex addict won’t have sex with me” and true head-scratchers like “i want to be not guilty because i have insanty.”
Hellmann says he started the site as a joke, but acknowledges it might tell us something about the way we ask questions and the way we seek answers.
“People have become reliant on search engines as the be-all, end-all place to search for information,” he said. “Most people think a search engine will have the answer to any question they could possibly have — whether it’s personal, professional or even spiritual.”
Hellmann says the site calls attention to odd prompts from all kinds of Internet users, like the not-so-savvy browsers who might pose overly polite questions, like “mapquest, please show me united arab emirates,” to more skilled Web searchers seeking the impossible, like “abraham lincoln gettysburg address youtube video.”
“That was probably a younger kid who grew up with YouTube and figured there’s a video for everything,” said Hellmann, who has recently started recruiting artists and illustrators to give him “their best visual interpretations” of the strange Internet searches that appear on his site, like “lobster fights,” and “brain damage from sniffing nail polish.”
The 25-year-old told FlashNews that some people are worried their names might be tied to the dumb questions that show up on SEOLOL.net.
But you’ve got nothing to fear — even if you’re the guy who asked for “exercises to get rid of man boobs.”
“Fortunately for us, as the general public, there is no personal identifying data attached to any of these searches,” he said.
From AOLNews
Well written blog post. Usually uncover great articles here on this website. Thanks much for sharing. I will add this blog to my faves. By the way, I am interested in paying for advertising space on your website. Looks like a sweet site to advertise on. Great information and smart design. Send to my email the ad details if you can. Have a happy new year.
I agree, it’s I remember, probably be useful