What the Search Bar Knows
The search bar is the most honest place on the internet. Nobody performs for it. You type what you actually want, in the exact words that occur to you at 2am, and hit enter in the private faith that the machine will help you or forget you asked. It won’t do either—somewhere a server is logging "glass explodes in ass" alongside your name and IP address—but the illusion of privacy is what makes it a confession booth.
A tenth installment of these search-term roundups produces the usual portrait: an audience that wants to know what Kate Moss’s tits look like, whether Lily Cole is actually ugly in person, why you’d sleep with an ex when you already know exactly how it ends, and whether there’s a specific term for sex while mowing the lawn. Someone searched "pudding with semen" and ended up here, which raises questions about the recipe and about this blog that I’m not prepared to answer. Someone needed to know what "I’m rich bitch" means, which is the most 2009 search query in existence. Someone typed "naked girls in biology class" and I genuinely cannot tell if that’s a student, a teacher, or a very confused nostalgia project.
The horny searches form their own taxonomy—aspirational ones like "Sailor Moon undressed," the strangely specific "different vaginas," the wistfully nostalgic "first lesbian adventure," and then "horny grandpas masturbating," which exists in a category entirely its own. The anxious ones land differently: "the government wants to kill us," from someone who stumbled here by accident and definitely didn’t find reassurance. "Shit alarm clock" is just a man having a Tuesday.
My favorite is "Hermann, I have the strength"—a sentence that reads like something you’d say to yourself in a bathroom mirror before walking back into a situation you know you shouldn’t. I’ve said the equivalent. Most people have. It’s all stored on a server somewhere now, sitting next to "sex with chocolate sauce" and "what does sex mean?"—someone’s very first question, typed into the void with no idea what would come back. The void answered. Here we are.