What You Were Actually Looking For

Google search analytics in 2009 was still a genuinely strange gift to bloggers—a window, opened without consent, into what people typed when no one was watching. The queries that landed on this site during any given week painted a portrait of the internet’s id that no amount of user research could have produced. I kept a running log. This was volume five.

The bulk of it was exactly what you’d expect: explicit, misspelled, and weirdly specific. Variations on anatomical improbabilities. Requests for free pornography organized by aesthetic criteria that spoke to very particular tastes. A concerning number of searches involving Sailor Moon. Emma Watson at the peak of her post-Hogwarts-but-pre-legal awkward period, which said something about the people involved that I chose not to examine too closely. Someone wanted lesbian content filtered specifically by footwear. Someone needed to know why semen smells like fish. Someone asked what the subway meant for us as human beings, which is either the most pretentious or the most genuinely curious thing you can type into a search engine.

There were flickers of something almost sweet: a person who wanted to look melancholy in public but couldn’t stop talking when someone said hello; a self-declared romantic; someone absolutely certain that Mighty Mouse was shit and needing the internet to agree. And then, almost buried between "dirty hair from behind" and something involving a dog, was a single query asking for help with imminent suicide. No quotation marks, no irony. Just a person at a keyboard, presumably late at night, typing it into a box.

That one I always stopped at. The rest of the list was easy to find funny. That one wasn’t.